Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

★★★★

Dir. George C. Wolfe NETFLIX: ST

Black American culture under the microscope in this powerful adaptation.

You can never really disguise those theatrical roots so sometimes it’s better not to even try. That’s the approach adopted by Tony-awardwinning playwright and director Wolfe in his powerful adaptation of the late August Wilson’s 1984 play, centred around an afternoon recording session by “the Mother of the Blues” in a Chicago studio in 1927. Wilson’s dialogue is intentionally musical, the play layered in a manner similar to the Georgia Jazz Band’s playing and given over to two soloists, Ma and her volatile horn player Levee, played respectively here by Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman. It’s in Davis and Boseman that the film finds its intense power, but all the performances are strong. And while weighted with serious themes (commerce, racism, religion, the Black experience) the film never feels didactic or inert but rather a tense, lyrical and often painful rumination on the deep and complex meaning of the blues.