White folk don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there.
In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, acclaimed playwright August Wilson used the real life blues-singer, and self-proclaimed “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey as an entry point into a fascinating and compelling exploration of all manner of compelling ideas: racial prejudice; cultural appropriation; art vs. commerce; the layers of privilege within racial subgroups; the struggle between pleasing an audience and expressing oneself; and the ever-simmering violence that seems to lurk just beneath the surface of all of these issues. The play, adapted into a film here by screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson and director George C. Wolfe, takes place in 1927; the play was originally performed in 1982; the film was released in 2020; I’m reviewing it in 2023. As I write this review today, we stand almost a century from the day the play is set, but the issues discussed here are vital and compelling and weighty . . . in 1927, 1982, 2020, today. And I think the film does a tremendously good job exploring these themes and ideas.
One of the reasons the film is able to explore these issues as well as it does really is the strength of the performances here. The script is excellent, don’t get me wrong, but the movie could easily slip into feeling didactic or overly talky in general. The performances, however, breathe real life into these characters, making them feel like real people, not just mouthpieces for ideas. Viola Davis, as always, is nothing short of riveting as Rainey. She has relatively little screen time, but she owns every second of it. Her singing voice is dubbed in most of the time, but the one scene where she does her own singing is one of the best scenes in the film, a seductive, sensual scene between Rainey and her young girlfriend. There’s an earthy desire to that scene that really knocked me out. That same kind of sweaty sensuality can be found in Chadwick Boseman’s performance as the doomed trumpeter Levee; he’s straining with all his might at every bond that is holding him back and nearly bursting with all the raw emotion he’s barely keeping at bay at every second. He’s a tormented man and we only discover how tormented as the film progresses. We think we’ve seen Boseman at his best when he’s given a lengthy, tortured monologue about his mother’s gang rape by a group of white men, but we’re not even close to his finest acting in this film. Late in the film, his rage finally explodes in a blasphemous rant where he dares God, not to face him, but to “turn your back on me” and it’s a performance of such raw intensity that it’s absolutely jaw-dropping. Boseman’s death at such a young age is already a tragedy without bringing the acting into it, but if Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom proves anything, it proves that Boseman was only getting better as an actor – this is certainly his best performance by a mile. Able support is given to these two lead performers by a solid ensemble, especially from the always excellent Colman Domingo and Glynn Turman as two of the other members of Rainey’s band.
As with a lot of play-to-film adaptations, Wolfe doesn’t do a whole lot to re-envision the play in a more cinematic way, but the fact that this entire film essentially takes place in two rooms is a feature, not a bug. One of the central themes is expressed by the difference between the luxurious room where Rainey records and the shabby locker room in the basement where the band members wait impatiently for their moment to be called up to the higher status room. There’s a recurring motif of Boseman’s Levee attempting to open a jammed door in the basement room and, if that symbolism is a little on the nose, it still works and goes to my point. This isn’t a “thriller” by any means, but it is, in its own way, a very suspenseful film. As these characters bounce off each other in these close, hot rooms, you can feel the tension rising and the sweat starting to drip. It’s a taut movie and it has a well-executed ticking clock in the premise of whether or not this dysfunctional group of people is going to manage to even record a single song or not. Anyway, I loved this movie; I think it nails its atmosphere perfectly, features two absolutely monumentally great performances and explores the wealth of themes and issues it has at its disposal with sharp and smart writing. It’s a movie with a lot on its mind that also has a raw, beating heart of exposed emotion and that’s about the best you can say. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Davis & Boseman are monumentally great in this adaptation of a sharp, incisive and raw August Wilson play; gripping, tense, filled with ideas but character based. 4 stars.