“Remember this: nobody puts words in my mouth.”
– Malcolm X*
The very opening image of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is, in many ways, and quite appropriately, indicative of the quality of the next three hours and twenty one minutes: an American flag caught aflame until the sigil of the eponymous hero’s chosen surname remains centered on the screen, while a speech of his blasts alongside Terence Blanchard’s semi-menacing brass score. Footage of Rodney King’s 1991 beating at the hands of LAPD officers intercut the conflagration.
An important thing to clarify, which may or may not escape the notice of first-time viewers (like me): the audio of the speech playing over the burning flag is not a verbatim transcript of, to my knowledge, any actual speech delivered by the historical Malcolm X. It is instead a composite of Malcolm X’s views—most pertinently from his famous 1964 “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, admixed with words from The Trial, a Black Nationalist morality play written by Louis Farrakhan—crafted by the writer-director himself.
Pair this with the Rodney King interpolation, and it is impossible not to acknowledge, from the preliminary seconds of the film, a stylized departure from whomever Malcolm X (Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) was in his living days into something more along the lines of a representation—a mascot, even, to put it less charitably—that serves the purposes of a particular artist in a particular time and place; a time and place which is, in spite of the continuing relevance of Malcolm X when it comes to the brutalization of Black people in America and the world over, rather distinct from the milieu the man himself emerged from, and thrived in, and learned to oppose.
Can, however, any film adequately capture a person’s life without reducing them into a representation? Certainly not—and Spike Lee, to his credit, acknowledged this:
I’m directing this movie and I rewrote the script, and I’m an artist and there’s just no two ways around it: this film about Malcolm X is going to be my vision of Malcolm X. But it’s not like I’m sitting atop a mountain saying, ‘Screw everyone, this is the Malcolm I see.’ I’ve done the research, I’ve talked to the people who were there.
The script Lee rewrote, based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X As Told To Alex Haley (1964), was the product of several aborted attempts, starting with a late 1960s collaboration between James Baldwin and Arnold Perl (off of producer Marvin Worth’s purchase of the adaptation rights) which infamously soured Hollywood for Baldwin, so repulsed was he by efforts to tinker with, and degrade, his original draft.
Baldwin, a contemporary and friend of Malcolm X’s, was harried from the very beginning by forces more interested in the Muslim minister’s palatability to modern audiences than the figure limned in X/Haley’s co-created portrait. Baldwin details the conflict thusly in his book-length essay of film analysis, The Devil Finds Work (1976):
I had no intention of betraying Malcolm…Yet, my producer had been advised, in an inter-office memo which I, quite unscrupulously, intercepted, that the writer (me) should be advised that the tragedy of Malcolm’s life was that he had been mistreated, early, by some whites, and betrayed (later) by many blacks: emphasis in the original. The writer was also to avoid suggesting that Malcolm’s trip to Mecca could have had any political implications, or repercussions.
And so, from the project’s earliest manifestations, attempts were made to siphon Malcolm X’s legacy of any potential problematics that might prohibit its transformation into a viable (i.e. marketable) product which a consumer-base of viewers (i.e. white viewers) could not only enjoy (i.e. stomach) but recommend. Many writers tried their hand at crafting such a palatable offering, but to no avail. It was not until Warner Bros. selected Norman Jewison to direct the adaptation that the project gained significant headway—a rising star, Denzel Washington, who’d already had a turn as Malcolm X on the stage, was chosen to play the titular figure.
The choice of director, unsurprisingly, provoked public outrage. Jewison, a white man, it went, could not possibly hope to reliably tell the story of one of the most significant Black activists in the nation’s history. One of the more outspoken voices of dissent from Warner Bros.’s decision was up-and-comer Spike Lee—already notable among the filmmaking crowd for outings like Do The Right Thing (1989) and Mo’ Better Blues (1990, which also starred Denzel Washington).
Protests halted production. Worth assented to the opposition. Jewison himself stepped down, and finally, Spike Lee was granted the position he’d dreamt of since his college years. A Black artist, to tell a Black hero’s story. The story of Malcolm X, no less: strident, with nerves of steel, the bane of civil complacency, be it Black or white. A disciple turned iconoclast turned martyr—someone whose radical views demanded a radical vision.
The transition was not met with complete acceptance, of course. A minority expressed heavy doubt that an artist like Lee was up to the challenge—among them writers like Amiri Baraka. This next cadre of dissenters feared a watering down of Malcolm X’s views, of his outspokenness when it came to the Black Muslim movement. They feared as well a playing-up of his years as a hustler, and thereby perpetuating certain stereotypes of Black men.
But the minority was too small, and Lee too ideal a choice to helm the project for their concerns, however valid, to delay production. This was 1991: the conservative cultural sentiments of the Reagan years were in full effect, and the Bush Administration did not represent, to many non-whites, a marked shift. Drug unrest (“Just Say No”), the scourge of HIV/AIDS—all disproportionately affecting Black populations.
An interesting, and socially-conscious, young movie maverick like Lee seemed downright necessary to further reinforce the reputation of a man whose relevance continued to intensify, especially with the Rodney King attack occurring earlier in the year. Who else, if not Spike Lee, would provide an artistic outlet for, a mass publicization of, his legacy? Who else, if not Spike Lee, would serve as an adequate representative for Malcolm X?
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This review will be uploaded either on May 19 or shortly thereafter; that auspicious day being the centenary, obviously, of Malcolm X. If assassins’ bullets had not torn into his body on February 21, 1965, and if various other threats had not reached bloody fruition, it would not be beyond the realm of possibility for him to still be alive today. Unlikely, of course, but other men have crossed that wizened threshold; and even so, to think of Malcolm X living through the social morass of the current century is as unlikely an image to conjure as that of him becoming a centenarian—so tied was he to the volatility of the Civil Rights Era, and so defined was his iconic life by his too-early death.
We didn’t really learn about Malcolm X in school. Perhaps this has changed, but when I was growing up, getting bullwhipped through the American Century meant taking a moment to pause at the middle in order to marvel at the bravery of figures like Rosa Parks and little Ruby Bridges, to be moved by the words and actions of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. It was their determined efforts to never stoop as low as their oppressors, to nonviolently weather all manner of verbal and physical abuse that, as per the lesson plan, most deserved our admiration. To work within the system granted down by the Founding Fathers so that it could be redeemed—and then to finally realize this shining dream in 1964, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act.
It was not as if the name “Malcolm X” never came up. But he was, at best, a secondary figure in the great march towards progress; a vocal and influential man who, nevertheless, used his oratorical gifts for regressive purposes: namely, for the advocation of violence against racist whites (who were, in his eyes, all racists anyway). The bitter shadow to Dr. King’s brilliant vision of equality peacefully attained. I vaguely remember his glaring, bearded mien in textbooks, usually with a long finger pointed somewhere accusingly, the very picture of militance.
Par for the course, really. I spent the bulk of my adolescence in Texas, where I can distinctly recall my middle school teacher stressing the fact that the South seceded over States’ Rights, and not slavery per se. But one grows up, and begins to expand one’s knowledge base beyond institutional bias, and eventually (if you care about history, that is) you learn about Malcolm X, and what he lived through and stood for.
It started rather late for me, I’m almost ashamed to say, as the majority of my in-depth readings were/are still being conducted in preparation for this very essay. I knew beforehand about his conversion to Islam, about his early stridency and his evolution towards a more nuanced, if not outright pacifistic, perspective after participating in a Hajj. I knew about his break with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam after revelations of sexual misconduct on the self-styled prophet’s part. I knew he was assassinated by members of the NOI, and I knew how deeply James Baldwin grieved for his death. (And I knew there was a 1992 biopic on him directed by Spike Lee…)
I did not know just how nuanced the man was; of his childhood, of the traumas and realizations experienced therein; the delinquency of his days running the numbers game as a conk-headed teen, his doomed affair with older, blond Sophia; his determination, while imprisoned, to educate himself in the books of a race he saw as devils.
Any thorough survey of Malcolm X will reveal him as a fascinatingly complex man who learned to distill the social reality of Black people in America into speeches, and various other public discourses, of such powerful rhetorical simplicity, that to deny his words would have been to deny, as an American, Black or otherwise, one’s own human situation—that situation being what W.E.B. Du Bois identified at the dawn of the twentieth century as “the problem of the color line.”
That his views evolved, encompassing a wider critique of the global system of oppression, after shedding the fanciful beliefs spawned by a huckster (who took extravagant financial donations from card-carrying white supremacists, no less), all without sacrificing the urgency of his message, is even worthier of renown…
…and all that to say, it is this general impression that any filmic portrayal which strives to be faithful to the cultural legacy, historical record, and autobiographical account of Malcolm X must, in some way, shape or fashion, attain. This is distinct from, but can be tied to, the other important and hopefully noncontroversial requirement that said filmic undertaking be, well, good.
Which brings me back, finally, to Spike Lee’s biopic. I might as well put my cards on the table now and say that, as a film critic, I was somewhat disappointed. As far as biopics go, it’s a rather staid account, more or less following the conventional “cradle-to-grave” tack which seeks to comprehensively survey a single life (first mistake). The aforementioned opening sequence, with the burning flag, contains some biting irony—compare this to the opening of Patton (1970), for instance; and it can be read as both a fiery condemnation of America and the incontrovertible nature of Malcolm X’s Americanness, no matter how righteously he railed against its sins—but is also, unfortunately, ham-fisted, outright heralding the film’s bookended spurts of propaganda (propaganda for views one believes in, and supports, is still propaganda, it should be said).
And there is the literally unavoidable aspect of Spike Lee, having cast himself as Shorty, Malcolm’s musician friend from Boston whom he came up with as a hustler before the advent of X. When, at the end of an exuberant lindy-hop sequence, he comically slides through a girl’s legs and up towards the camera, and gives it a knowing smirk, it is only further evidence to the viewer that she is watching not merely Malcolm X, but Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Again, Lee has not denied this, and to star in one’s own production is no sin, but there is something jarring, almost self-satisfied, about the fourth-wall-breaks—as if Malcolm X cannot speak for himself, and needs Spike Lee to trumpet his relevancy to contemporary events. To piggyback on bell hooks’s scathing critique of the film:
Lee’s own presence in the film, as Malcolm’s friend Shorty, intensifies the sense of spectacle. It sometimes seems as though he were competing for attention with Denzel Washington as Malcolm, upstaging him with comic antics.
The casting of Malcolm X is also another matter I have some reservations about. I am perfectly aware of how hot a take this is, and to even hint at the notion that Denzel Washington is not one of the three or five greatest actors of all time is nigh-blasphemy to anyone who regularly consumes movies and television, but all the same: Washington is undoubtedly a good actor (he has the “largeness” of the best stage performers, and is also one of the very few things worth commending in Ridley Scott’s 2024 mediocrity Gladiator II); chameleonic, however, he is not. He can ably mimic some of the man’s piercing intensity, as well as the speech patterns when it comes to his rhetoric, but you are, for three hours, simply watching Washington deliver a suitable impression of an icon, and little more.
Part of this is surely due to the limitations of Lee’s script, and not only Washington’s in/abilities. For all its considerable length, and masses of extras, and the millions of dollars forcefully poured into its budget, how much of the film expresses truly significant creativity? Does it even fully succeed as a character study? We get the early racist putdowns against the young Malcolm Little, and his conk-wearing braggadocio as Detroit Red, and his travails with and against the Nation of Islam, but none are explored to the depth that they are in the autobiography. Instead, we get Spike Lee mugging at the camera, and unnecessary erotic scenes with Sophia that were never (and wisely so) elaborated by X/Haley.
Yes, it’s impressive how Malcolm X manages to retain structural integrity for three hours, and there are some nice cuts here and there, but even when Lee does take creative liberties with the source material, he fudges: Why, for instance, does he invent a Nation of Islam disciple (loosely based on Bimbi, a far more interesting personage than the resulting transmogrification) in prison who introduces the teachings of Elijah Muhammad to Malcolm when, in reality, it was his siblings who fostered his conversion?
Perhaps it is because, in order for Lee to complete his portrait of Malcolm X as Caesar (the figure he cuts in this film is decidedly martial, even as he softens towards the end), he requires a Brutus; the film, as a result, takes on the tenor of a masculine power struggle over resources, influence, and, most significantly, self-conception. (I am further piggybacking on points raised in bell hooks’s review; her description of the film effectively “orphaning” Malcolm from some of the more formative aspects of his upbringing are apt.)
This is not to say that such cannot be worth exploring; but, deployed as it is in the film, is not explored deeply or interestingly enough, thus stymying Malcolm X’s life and philosophy, especially since it widened in scope and became explicitly critical of issues like world capitalism and imperialism. The Malcolm X who journeyed with truth-seeking people of every color to Mecca and brought wiser levity to his condemnations is all well and good, but is there room in Spike Lee’s film for this Malcolm X:
“…all of the countries that are emerging today from under the shackles of colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don’t think it’s an accident. Most of the countries that were colonial powers were capitalistic countries, and the last bulwark of capitalism today is America. It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can’t have capitalism without racism. And if you find one and you happen to get that person into a conversation and they have a philosophy that makes you sure they don’t have this racism in their outlook, usually they’re socialists or their political philosophy is socialism.” (Malcolm X’s May 29, 1964 speech regarding the Harlem “Hate-Gang” Scare, from Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, Edited with Prefatory Notes by George Breitman)
It’s given a slight nod, sure, but that’s it. And to be fair, I did not see the Deleted Scenes, so there’s a chance that such reprisals of the man’s publicly held views were simply excised from the theatrical release. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. Lee, after all, was not awarded the role of director on the merits of his anti-capitalism, if such can even be accurately stuck on him.
I could go on, but anyone genuinely interested in coming to some critical conclusion on the film will seek it out for themselves. And to be honest, as I write this, and Malcolm X’s centenary approaches, I am keenly aware of the place the film occupies in many people’s hearts and minds. In fact, whenever it came up in conversation with strangers that I was working on a write-up for Malcolm X, almost every single one practically gushed with enthusiasm for the movie, for how it lionizes an oft-maligned and misunderstood American icon. Such interactions did not give off the whiff of gullible innocents being duped into some sinisterly misplaced appreciation.
For what it’s worth, inasmuch as the film does espouse Malcolm X’s invaluable critiques of racist evils and racial inequality, as well as his philosophical evolution, it contains enough educational value to recommend on that basis alone.
On the other hand, I do not take it as misplaced criticality, on my part, to desire an artistic undertaking the quality of which is fully commensurate to the stature of its subject. Great personalities, for good or ill, demand great portrayals. What Malcolm X gets here, however, is far from that high watermark. You’d do better by reading the book, which, despite the incredulousness one must always bring to ventures ripe with self-mythologization, at least stems from the man himself. And it’s those particular words, at the end of the day, that matter most.
[*quotation taken from Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, Edited with Prefatory Notes By George Breitman, from article by Alvin Adams, Jet, March 5, 1965]
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More from Ezekiel Yu: Solitude’s Remains: Review of “Ode to Nothing” (2018), Bright-Eyed Devils & The Blues: On Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” (2025), Not For Human Eyes: On Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera” (2023)