Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Parent Guide

It’s the Roaring Twenties and blues legend Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) has brought her touring band to Chicago to record a new album. But not all is going to plan – tensions between Ma and her talented young horn player, Levee (Chadwick Boseman) have been building for days, and threaten to derail the entire deal. Were that not enough, Levee is determined to start trouble with the rest of the band and antagonizes them at every opportunity. Meanwhile, the record producer, Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne) and Ma’s manager, Irvin (Jeremy Shamos), are finding Ma’s from her musical talents. Over the course of the recording session, things go from bad to worse…

This adaptation of August Wilson’s 1984 play never quite loses the feeling of the stage, which I think is a point in its favor. I always hate movies based on plays that bear no resemblance to their source material, and it’s hard to make a screenplay work on film that was designed to work on stage without keeping some of the conventions of theatre. That means long takes, dramatic monologues, and vibrant larger-than-life characters. In this case, these all work brilliantly, and the result is a captivating 90 minute drama.

Intriguing though it may be, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom isn’t a movie for everyone, specifically, children. Along with a heaping helping of cussing, there is a brief sex scene, and a good deal of dialogue which contains some very mature subject matter. While that dialogue is critical in building and developing these characters, it’s also about rape, lynching, and murder: hardly elementary school entertainment. Older teens, on the other hand, should be able to cope with just about everything in this film. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being shown in schools at some point, either in English or Drama classes, as a companion to the original play.

There’s a lot to watch here: Viola Davis is as dynamic as I’ve ever seen her, and Boseman brings Levee a high-strung, determined intensity that makes his character shine in a work full of dramatic performances. The music is another standout, which is unsurprising – Ma Rainey is not a fictional construct but a real icon of the blues, and her music floats off the screen and all the way back to its roots in Georgia of the 1920s. This is a masterclass in theatrical adaptation, high-intensity acting, and screenwriting. It’s a shame neither the original author nor the lead actor can be here to see its success.