Biopics Are Not The Gospel

When one watches a movie based on true events, one should keep in mind that the movie is not a documentary and that the filmmakers for dramatic reasons fictionalize and change details about what really happened.

A case in point would be 2020's One Night in Miami, an otherwise well-done, riveting movie directed by the Oscar-winning actress Regina King.

The movie takes place in February 1964 when Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) comes to Miami to vie for the heavyweight championship against his rival Sonny Liston.

Following Ali's victory in the ring, he, the singer Sam Cooke, the firebrand orator Malcolm X, and the football player Jim Brown hole up in a motel room where they share their innermost thoughts, experiences, and aspirations. No one knows for sure what was actually said that night. Kemp Powers, the screenwriter, can only conjecture about what may have occurred, relying on his imagination.

Jim Brown, who recently passed away, was the last surviving participant in that motel gathering and would have known how close Powers came to accurately depicting that night. However, a couple of facts were not accurately presented.

For instance, when Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali are by themselves, Brown expresses to Ali his reluctance to admit to the others that he is giving up his football career to pursue movie acting. What's missing in that scene is Ali telling Brown to relax since he himself appeared in the movie Requiem for a Heavyweight two years prior.

Another scene gets the chronology wrong about when Sam Cooke wrote and recorded "A Change is Gonna Come."  Malcolm goes to the record player and plays Bob Dylan singing "Blowin' in the Wind" and asks Cooke why he hadn't written a song that was as socially and politically relevant. That confrontation, according to the movie, causes Cooke to write "A Change is Gonna Come." Actually, Cooke recorded the song less than a month before the motel gathering in Miami.

Peter Guralnick, Cooke's biographer, in an essay in the companion booklet to the 30-song CD Sam Cooke: Portrait of a Legend, 1951-1964 (2003), relates that after hearing the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary's hit recording of "Blowin' in the Wind," he told his friend and song publishing partner J.W. Alexander, "Alec, I got to write something. Here's a white boy [Bob Dylan] writing a song like this...." (Guralnick calls "A Change is Gonna Come" Cooke's magnum opus.)

If one were to examine One Night in Miami closely, there are no doubt other inaccuracies. But, hey, that's Hollywood. You can still enjoy the movie. Just don't accept everything you're seeing and hearing as the gospel.