Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Dir: George C. Wolfe (1hr 34mins) (15)

★★★★

The late Chadwick Boseman gave his final performance in this “ferociously intelligent” film, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Adapted from the play by August Wilson, it focuses on four black session musicians who are hanging around a Chicago studio one “stiflingly hot” day in 1927, waiting to record an album with the legendary blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (played with “tremendous hauteur” by Viola Davis). Boseman is the pushy young trumpeter Levee, who is angling for his own version of the lead track to be recorded. The white studio bosses sense it might have an appeal beyond Ma Rainey’s black fan base, but – when the singer sweeps in, like a queen with her entourage – she fears Levee means to upstage her. A power struggle ensues, fraught with issues of sex and race.

Boseman gives what will surely be the “first posthumous Oscar-winning turn (for best supporting actor) since Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. He is “a huge presence here, outwardly abrasive yet brittle inside”, and mesmerising in a “pindrop set piece” midway through the film, about the gang-rape of the trumpeter’s mother and the murder of his father by white supremacists in Alabama. Levee is up against a system that was built to treat black Americans “as a commodity”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. For Ma, the answer is simply “to make hay while the sun shines”. But Levee wants to make the system work for him – triggering a final crisis that hits the viewer “with steam-train force”. In cinemas, and available on Netflix from 18 December.