CHADWICK BOSEMAN’S FINAL PERFORMANCE.
Where to begin? It seems an appropriate question to ask of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the gale-force 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 whiteman’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.
So again— where to begin? I’m still not sure, but then I’m not in bad company. After all, 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 oldtimey 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.
Davis is little short of stunning in the kind of brassy, feather-waving, no-prisoner-staking diva showcase she’s rarely attempted. (It’s a decidedly far cry fromher Oscarwinning turn in the last major Wilson adaptation, “Fences.”) Resplendent in bold, spangly gowns and sheathed in form-padding rubber, her Ma Rainey is both a stellar performer and a mesmerizing object of contemplation.
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 near-equal in stubbornness and ego.
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.
And it’s ameasure of this movie’s discipline that the other actors, rather than being crowded out of the frame or overpowered by Boseman or Davis, register as vividly as they do. Domingo’s Cutler, bent on maintaining order and ensuring that no one supersedes Ma’s will, goes head to head with Levee and acquits himself admirably. Turman, reprising a role he played at the Mark Taper Forum in 2016, nails the gorgeous wistfulness of Toledo’s lament for an African diaspora in tatters: Likening all of history to a richly flavored stew, he sadly concludes that “the colored man is the leftovers.”
Levee sets out to refute that cruel fate, only to rush headlong into another. And Boseman, evincing the same integrity he clung to his entire career, refuses to softpedal the destination. He imparts to this seething, shattered man the gift of a broken soul, riven by anger and trauma, and makes him all the more human for it. His final moments of screen time are among his darkest, and also his finest.