Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Review

This began as part of Denzel Washington's deal to bring August Wilson's plays to the screen, first at HBO and then, by 2019, at Netflix, which shot it in Pittsburgh that summer. George C. Wolfe directs Ruben Santiago-Hudson's adaptation with the play's bones intact: a band waiting in a cramped rehearsal room, a star who arrives late and makes the white men wait, and a single session in which grievance, ambition and history boil over.

Viola Davis plays Ma as a woman who knows her voice is her only leverage and spends it without mercy. Chadwick Boseman, who died of colon cancer during post-production, plays Levee as a live wire whose jokes keep sliding into rage, and his monologues about his mother and about God are the finest work of his career. Glynn Turman, Colman Domingo and Michael Potts are superb as the older players who have seen men like Levee before.

The staging rarely escapes the stage, and Tobias A. Schliessler's camera mostly keeps up rather than leads, but with Wilson's language this rich that is enough. Boseman and Davis both won Screen Actors Guild awards and Oscar nominations, Boseman won a posthumous Golden Globe, and the film won Academy Awards for makeup and hairstyling and for Ann Roth's costumes.