MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM

The headstrong Ma demands a bottle of Coca-Cola, insists on offering her stuttering nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) a prominent part in the album recording, and proceeds to butts heads with an impetuous and ambitious trumpeter named Levee Green (Chadwick Boseman, 'Black Panther'). Also exacerbating tensions is the exploitative nature of the blues recording industry of the early 20th century - the music business has always been shady, but I don't think anybody had it worse than these early black artists.

Essentially a chamber play set in a series of dimly lit, secluded rooms in the basement of the recording studio, the staging of 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' is so closely related to the source material that it detracts from the film. Wolfe is a renowned theatre director, but film is its own medium, and needs to be exploited for the benefits it can bring to storytelling - the lift and shift of the stage show to film prevents this one from really succeeding. Recent films like Regina King's adaptation of 'One Night in Miami' and Kornél Mundruczó's adaptation of 'Pieces of a Woman' successfully navigated this, whereas 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' feels too disjointed and confined - even more so than 'Fences', a previous August Wilson adaptation directed by Denzel Washington (who produced Wolfe's film).

The main attraction here stems from the words and the actors. Domingo is always terrific, Boseman is convincing and human with difficult material, Turman is granted his own moment to shine with a sage monologue at the seat of a piano, and Davis is revelatory. No opportunity is wasted and she brings a towering physicality to the role (contrasting interestingly with her meek character in 'Fences'). Davis does an incredible job of channelling Ma's righteous indignation as a black woman who deserves far more than she gets (and is well aware of that fact), and the strength that a woman must have to stand up for herself in a white man's society. The dialogue may give the impression of rambling at times, especially when the band members are interacting with each other, but each word uttered is reflective of the characters and their respective mindsets.

As a film adaptation, 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' isn't so much a movie as it is a play with a few more options; a showcase for its actors rather than a cinematic experience. But the play it adapts is very good, one of my favourites of Wilson's. It's from an era of theatre in the United States that dealt heavily with the casualties of the American Dream, where you're sold a bill of goods but they'll never come through for you and you spend your whole life chasing a phantom. I think those messages are still relevant - if not more so now - than they were when they were originally written.