Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opens on what looks like danger: two small bodies sprinting through the woods at night, panting heavily as dogs bark after them. Just as we brace ourselves for the worst, however, the meaning of the scene changes. These Black boys aren’t running from horror but toward pleasure, into a tent where a crowd has gathered to watch Ma Rainey put on a show.
Right away, it’s clear to see why. As played by Viola Davis, Ma commands such presence that we, like her cheering audience, hang onto her every wail and shimmy. She’s a singular talent, the kind you don’t mess with — though many will try over the next 90ish minutes.
Boseman plays his last moments with such emotional force that the effort seem to empty him completely, and they land like a punch to the gut.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom takes place in the midst of the Great Migration, and Ma would seem to be one of the lucky ones who’ve escaped the crushing poverty and racist violence of the rural South. The bulk of the film takes place during a 1927 recording session in Chicago where Ma calls the shots. Even her white manager, Irvin (Jeremy Shamos), and his boss (Johnny Coyne), Sturdyvant, bend to their star client’s wishes, fussing over her drink order, smoothing over her legal troubles, and caving to her artistic choices.
But there’s an enormous gulf between respect and exploitation, between amusement and understanding. Ma knows it, her band knows it, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, adapted by screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson from a play by August Wilson, lives in it. “They don’t care nothing about me. All they want is my voice,” says Ma of her white collaborators, and she’s right. If Ma throws her weight around, if she shows up late to sessions, if she bosses Irvin around like a servant and wastes fat wads of Sturdyvant’s money, the disregard she shows them is nothing compared to the barely concealed disdain they have for her. Davis disappears into Ma’s defiant swagger, to the point where she can convey a silent (but unmistakable) fuck you through a gesture as mundane as putting on a hat.
Still, at least Ma has past success on her side, and at least she gets to enjoy the perks that come with it, including a beautiful girlfriend (Taylour Paige) she gets to shower with lavish gifts. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom‘s other big storyline centers on a young man at the other end of what could be an equally brilliant career — her hotshot trumpeter, Levee (Chadwick Boseman). Unlike the rest of Ma’s band of trusty old-timers (played by Colman Domingo, Glynn Turman, and Michael Potts), Levee has no intention of sticking around. He wants to start his own band, and he’s blessed with the talent, ambition, and charisma to do it, if only Sturdyvant would give him the chance.
Image: David Lee / Netflix
It’s impossible to ignore that the man we’re watching play this character is himself someone who seemed to be at the beginning of an unstoppable rise. The late Boseman tears into the role with the hunger of a man who might never eat again. His eyes sparkle with mischief, dance with excitement, and glitter with anger — coiled on ice at times, exploding in flames at others. It’s a thunderous, full-bodied performance that would have ranked among the best in any year, and certainly rates as one of his finest to date. In December 2020, it feels so lively that it’s almost painful to watch.
But everything about Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom feels vivid. As the recording session stretches on and on, forever tripped up by one conflict or another, the actors get the chance to unleash Wilson’s dialogue on one another, trading rapid-fire quips or unleashing torrential-downpour monologues. (Of the supporting characters, Turman’s Toledo gets some particularly juicy ones.) The conversations they have are of soaring hopes and crushing trauma, of the giddy satisfaction of new shoes and the struggle of being Black in a society run by white people — about everything in life, in other words.
The downside to the film’s almost musical rhythm is that it never quite transcends its stagey feel. Despite director George C. Wolfe’s best efforts to go outside the bounds of the set from time to time, it’s all too easy to envision the curtains that would go around the studio rehearsal room. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue against the power of seeing Boseman or Davis’ faces fill the screen, letting us in on every quiver of his lip or blink of her tired eyes.
Especially in its powerful final moments. Though it’s Ma who opens the movie, and Ma whose name is in the title, it’s Levee’s arc that closes the film. Boseman plays his last moments with such emotional force that the effort seem to empty him completely, and they land like a punch to the gut. Disrespect and disappointment can destroy a soul as sure as anything and, as an enraging coda reminds us, huge swaths of the American music industry have been built on the disrespect of Black artists. By the end of the movie, Ma and Levee don’t seem so different from those boys in the forest — racing to reach the music before the darkness can consume them.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is now streaming on Netflix.