Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a fine adaptation of August Wilson's play elevated by Chadwick Boseman, Viola Davis - ABC News

For all the tributes that poured in for Chadwick Boseman, who passed away in August aged just 43, the most transfixing measure of his loss is what he put on screen.

In Ma Rainey's Black Bottom — an anxious, sweat-soaked adaptation of August Wilson's acclaimed play about blues musicians dealing with racism in the 20s — the star is sinewy and soulful, charming and desperate, railing against god and injustice with a ferocity that threatens to shake the heavens.

Little did we know that it would become his final performance.

This lean, tightly-wound chamber piece stars Boseman as Levee, an ambitious young horn player for Ma Rainey, the legendary Southern blues diva played — with simmering, heavyweight intensity — by Viola Davis.

Paramount Records marketed Ma Rainey as the "Songbird of the South", the "Gold-Neck Woman of the Blues" and the "Mother of the Blues".(Supplied: Netflix/David Lee)

It's 1927, and the Mother of the Blues has gathered her band in Chicago for a recording session of the titular standard, a song that her white manager and studio producer are eager to press on wax for their mainstream audience.

In the cramped, dimly-lit recording studio, Ma's band — the fancy, fleet-footed Levee, trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo), pianist Toledo (Glynn Turman) and double-bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts) — banter and bicker over the song's arrangement as they await the arrival of their star, sketching a contemporary Black experience where slavery is a recent memory and segregation remains a part of everyday life.

"If you coloured and you can make them some money, then you alright with them," Ma says of her producers, "otherwise you just a dog in the alley."

Creative egos clash over musical styles, as Levee comes to blows with Ma.(Supplied: Netflix)

The callous, profit-driven expediency of the music industry is a stark contrast to the film's evocative opening passage, which captures Ma, deep in the Georgia woods, in thrilling, full-bodied flight. Smeared with dark eye makeup, skin glistening and flashing her metallic grill, Ma is seen working an emancipated Black audience with the sass and swagger of a high priestess.

It's a moment straight out of some formative myth, practically a witness to the genesis of 20th-century pop, and its power is something that Ma carries with her as she negotiates the terms of her recording.

Ma's arrival at the studio— with her flirtatious lover, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), in tow — escalates the intra-band tension, especially when she insists that her stammering nephew (Dusan Brown) perform the song's intro, necessitating endless, humourous takes.

Creative egos clash over musical styles, as Levee — designed as the ghost of some bebop future — comes to blows with Ma, who's worked hard to give the traditional blues its due.

Ma Rainey is the only LGBTQ character in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, and the only one based on a real person.(Supplied: Netflix/David Lee)

Wilson's play, written back in 1982, is clear-eyed in its scathing appraisal of the music industry, and its themes of cultural appropriation continue to resonate. Like so much popular dance, the 'Black Bottom' of Ma Rainey's song originated in African-American culture before becoming a national craze in the flapper age, just as her style of blues will later be assimilated by white rock 'n' roll.

As Ma explains, "They don't care nothin' about me — all they want is my voice."

"These characters had big visions, big dreams, and the past became a huge obstacle in achieving that," Davis says.(Supplied: Netflix)

Davis has returned to Wilson's words after her Oscar-winning turn in Denzel Washington's Fences (2016), the first in a proposed series of adaptations of the playwright's famous Pittsburgh Cycle. (Washington, who has struck a deal with Netflix to adapt the remaining plays for the screen, remains on board as a producer here.)

It's a fantastic, physically imposing performance that evokes Ma's formidable presence, a world-weary, imperious survivor who's had to fight for her scraps of respect. (She deserves another Oscar, or at least a multi-million dollar endorsement deal, for her Coca-Cola slurping abilities alone.)

Davis gives Ma the dimensions of a personality that feels too big, too raw to ever be captured on 78rpm — which, even on those relatively primitive recordings, is how she continues to sound all these decades later.

Director George C. Wolfe said "day after day, take after take, Chadwick more than delivered. His work was brilliant".(Supplied: Netflix)

Veteran stage and screen director George C. Wolfe (Nights in Rodanthe, Broadway's Angels in America) doesn't strain to obscure the film's theatrical origins, wisely leaning in to Wilson's structure and allowing the dialogue to determine the performances.

While this theatricality will be off-putting for some, there are also some evocative exteriors and vivid, saturated colours courtesy of cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, and the score, by jazz veteran Branford Marsalis, gives the film an authentically rich period sound.

On occasion, Wolfe also augments scenes with shots of Jazz Age Black America, while the film's bitterly ironic send off — footage of an all-white jazz band smiling and mugging their way through one of Levee's compositions — fires a righteous shot to the very heart of pop music.

It's a coda made all the more painful by Levee's psychic spiral in the final act — and by Boseman's extraordinary, tragic performance.

As an adaptation of Wilson's work, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom does what it needs to do, and does it well; as a testament to Boseman, and a reminder of what was lost, it's unmissable.

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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is on Netflix from Friday December 18.

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2020-12-16 19:04:00Z
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