Appropriately, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a film adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play (Netflix, December 18), begins with some theater. Director George C. Wolfe’s camera follows eager patrons into a well-lit tent. There, large and looming on stage, gold teeth flashing, is the titular blues singer, wailing away with the brassy insouciance of someone eagerly defying her time and place. It’s the 1920s, and Black musicians like Rainey (Viola Davis) are finding massive popularity, but are still subject to the terrible violations of Jim Crow laws and other slightly less codified modes of oppression. Yet on this stage Rainey is queen, ruling over all as she belts out a lament that really sounds like a shout of triumph.
It’s quite a way to begin the film, a piercing evocation of the story’s era that feels celebratory while still haunted by menace. That darkness stalks Ma Rainey’s characters as they retreat into a pair of rooms, housed within a Chicago recording studio, where Rainey and her band are set to immortalize a host of her standards. She’s running late, but the band has assembled to practice. Steady, pragmatic Cutler (Colman Domingo), the trombonist, just wants to get the band in shipshape for Rainey’s arrival. Pianist Toledo (Glynn Turman) and bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts) want to get their work done too, but brash young coronet player Levee (Chadwick Boseman) keeps derailing the process. The record’s white producer has promised Levee that they’ll use his new, flashier arrangements, while his bandmates know that Rainey will refuse to do any version other than exactly her own.
The band’s banter and bickering amiably fills the little basement practice room, each actor grooving on Wilson’s robust language. It feels like a hang movie, but there is still that insistent needling of dread, an unsettled air that could simply be a reverberation of the unjust world outside the studio’s walls (inside them, too)—or could be indicating a specific tragedy, local to these characters.
Wolfe, a venerable New York theater artist who has dabbled in film over the years, gets out of the play’s way. There is a cinematic quality to Ma Rainey: its searching, hungry camerawork; its lush hues; its movie-star turns. But Wolfe knows that Wilson’s work is, above all, about the language, the torrents of talk that, over ten plays, crafted a rich portrait of Black life in 20th century America. Not much film magic is needed to give that text life; you really just need the right version of the script (this thoughtful adaptation was done by Ruben Santiago-Hudson) and the right actors.
Which Wolfe has found. Domingo, Potts, and Turman all play their notes with fluid grace, rising and dipping on Wilson’s waves in natural rhythms. Davis left most of the singing to the vocal artist Maxayn Lewis, but still manages to register Rainey as her own creation, a proud and petty woman whose ego is both impediment and necessity. Ma Rainey is, in some of its most effective stretches, a story of the music legends whose legacies were diminished in favor of white artists and producers who borrowed—or, really, stole—from their Black predecessors and contemporaries. Rainey was not only a Black woman: she was, by all accounts, queer, further pushing her into the margins despite a talent and renown that held her in the public consciousness. Rainey is both shunned and revered, a dichotomy that Davis—one of the most lauded interpreters of Wilson’s work—illustrates with potent fury and ache.
She is, though, ultimately a supporting player in Ma Rainey. The true lead is Boseman, as Levee’s ambition and youthful swagger take center stage. In Levee, Wilson captures the swell of change, both destructive and vital. Levee stands on generational fault lines—between artistic traditions of the past and of the future, between old-timers born in the immediate shadow of slavery (and, of course, born into it) and the younger people eager to cast off the traumatic weight of history, to seize what they can in the present tense, violent and dangerous as that present still is.
Levee does have trauma of his own, and his fiery, staccato, unwieldy optimism is easily read as him fleeing that darkness as fast as he can—dancing away from it, careening through life in search of transcendence. He’s sly and calculating, but also in some senses flying blind. It’s a complicated character, a tragic figure whose personal woes exist alongside, and in conversation with, even bigger things.
To communicate all that, Boseman shakes off the stoicism of Wakandan leader T’Challa (whom he played in several Marvel movies, most notably 2018’s watershed Black Panther) and taps into the frenetic energy last seen in his portrayal of James Brown in Get On Up. Levee is fictional, though, so Boseman needn’t do any mimicry of an icon. He could invent Levee almost entirely, an opportunity that is seized with relish. It’s a thrill, watching Boseman bounce and fluster around. It’s awfully sad, too, knowing that this is the last we’ll see of his talent’s many emerging facets and variations. As in the rest of Ma Rainey, the mournfulness of that meta fact—Boseman died of cancer in August, at the age of 43—does not drown out the verve, the heat of his creative furnace. Boseman’s performance is wondrously alive, one to be savored for many years.
The way Ma Rainey’s cast maneuvers Wilson’s dialogue, and his heavy themes, is the film’s chief pleasure. It’s a tricky play to stage; it rushes toward a blunt and bitter end, closing on a note of despondency that would seem to fly in the face of the rollicking music and caustic merriment that’s come before. But there is still something sprightly, vigorous in all its elegy—a frequency that Boseman, Davis, and the rest of the company are keenly attuned to, with Wolfe’s no-doubt invaluable help. If aspects of Ma Rainey feel staid, whereas on stage they would soar, I think that mostly has to do with expectations. There is something small—or, at least, intimate—about Ma Rainey that its starry cast and loud clamor don’t immediately suggest. But if you can approach the film from the right perspective, huddle closely around its pained song, it has much to offer. It’s one of the most finely acted films of the season, and a fitting send-off for an artist snatched away far too soon.
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