The Power of Four

Regina King’s film reimagines a meeting of Black icons.

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MOVIES / HELEN SHAW

The past year has seen a stampede of theatrical projects leaping into the movies. Classics like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom are vaulting onscreen; recent Broadway ventures are getting Hollywood makeovers (The Prom and The Boys in the Band); filmed events are even popping up in popular streaming queues—American Utopia, What the Constitution Means to Me, Hamilton. It’s an irony during a time that has threatened live performance with total destruction that our screens are hungrier than ever for theater turned film.

Kemp Powers’s 2013 play, One Night in Miami, was not an obvious candidate for filming. For one thing, it observes the unities: a single location, a single span of time, a single action. In adapting this compact script for the screen, director Regina King interleaves a few scenes that take us into a wider world and chronology, but she’s mainly content to stay intimately, even claustrophobically, close to four men talking. If someone stands up to go to the door in this movie, it’s an event. If they step outside, it’s a cataclysm.