‘ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ shows Boseman at finest

Where to begin? It seems an appropriate question to ask of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the galeforce whirlwind of a film adapted from August Wilson’s 1982 play. Sweepingly directed by George C. Wolfe and incisively adapted by Ruben Santiago- Hudson, it’s a story of Black lives and Black music in the early 20th century that has lost little of its significance in the 21st. And like most stage and screen productions of Wilson’s work, it’s a feast of inspired talk that leaves an audience, in turn, with no shortage of things to talk about.

There is, for one, the undimmed resonance of Wilson’s insights into the challenges and contradictions of African American identity. There are the joys, frustrations and inevitable compromises of making art, especially if you happen to be a musician of color in a white man’s recording studio, fighting to assert every inch of your domain ( or to forge one to begin with). Most of all, there is the late Chadwick Boseman, giving a furiously inventive screen performance that also happens to be his last. It’s one spellbinding final reminder of what we’ve lost, and of how easily God, to invoke one of Wilson’s unseen major characters, can giveth and taketh away.

One of the story’s key conflicts finds several characters butting heads over the opening notes of a song, the very one that gives this play its title. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey ( a spectacular Viola Davis), the pioneering Southern singer hailed far and wide as “the Mother of the Blues,” wants to stick with her usual arrangement, complete with an old- timey introduction that she expects her hapless nephew, Sylvester ( Dusan Brown), to deliver. But her ambitious trumpet player, Levee ( Boseman), wants to dispense with that “old jug- band music” and tap into a newer, jazzier sound, one far removed from the traveling tent shows where Ma Rainey’s career began.

The story unfolds over a sweltering hot day in 1927 Chicago, briefly evoked with outdoor sets that have a glorious studio- backlot artifice. Ma Rainey is running predictably late for her recording session and winds up ceding much of the narrative spotlight to her band, which includes Ma’s guitar and trombone player, Cutler ( Colman Domingo); her pianist, Toledo ( Glynn Turman); and her bass player, Slow Drag ( Michael Potts). They’re all consummate professionals who want the same thing as Ma’s frazzled agent, Irvin ( Jeremy Shamos): to rehearse the songs, cut a good record and get in and out as quickly as possible.

They are thwarted on all fronts by Levee, who shows up well before Ma but turns out to be her nearequal in stubbornness and ego. Waltzing into the studio’s dingy rehearsal space with a shiny new pair of shoes and a pocket full of original songs he’s writing, Levee dreams big and talks even bigger: He’s impassioned, impudent and proudly insubordinate.

Levee is lean and agile — his pinstripe suit seems to hang off him as he dances and whirls — but he’s also larger than life. And Boseman, crossing into that zone where acting becomes an act of possession, unleashes the kind of intensely physical grab- you- by- the- lapels performance that the screen can hardly contain. Music — a defining passion of James Brown, his greatest role before this one — clearly had a way of unlocking his demonic inner showman.