From stage to screen, a likely award-winner

MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM

It’s 1927 and tensions in a Chicago recording studio are beginning to rise. The singer, Ma Rainey – known as ‘the Mother of the Blues’ – is running late, while downstairs her band are starting to argue. Everyone agrees they have to play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – the saucy-sounding title is the name of a dance and their best-known number – but the ambitious young trumpeter Levee wants to use his new, upbeat arrangement. His bandmates disagree. The stage is set. Viola Davis (right) as Ma and the late Chadwick Boseman as Levee are on award-winning form in a film that never quite shakes off its theatrical origins of the August Wilson play. From Friday