Amazon’s making a play for award season in a big way with One Night In Miami…, a Regina King-directed film centered around Cassius Clay’s defeat of Sonny Liston in 1964. The new trailer released on Monday depicts the theatrical version of the award-winning play of the same name.
The trailer showcases some emotional moments between the men, from the soon-to-be Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree) in the ring battling Liston to tough conversations about the future of the civil rights movement playing out at the time of the film. The movie features Black men from very different fields all experiencing the same struggles because of race, as well as them finding their place in the movement.
The One Night In Miami stage play, written by Kemp Powers, is a fictionalized account of conversations between Malcolm X (played here by Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cook (Leslie Odom Jr.), and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) have while in Miami for the Clay fight.
“Everything’s not so black and white like you make it out to be,” Odom’s Cook says at one point in the trailer, interspersed with images from the Clay match and tense music.
“But we are fighting for our lives,” Ben-Adir’s Malcolm X appears to reply, showcasing some of the powerful rhetorical skills that the real-life civil rights icon once had. There’s certainly a lot of drama in the trailer alone, and it’s a conversation that still very much rings true, especially in the months following the second civil rights revival that the U.S.experienced in 2020.
One Night In Miami… starts streaming on Amazon on January 15.