This adaptation of a tragedy by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson might retain the mostly minimal setting of its source material — two rooms in a Chicago recording studio — but the searing performances at its heart more than warrant the translation to the big screen. A ferocious Viola Davis plays the titular ‘Mother of the Blues’, a fiery artist whose diva-ness is powerfully revealed to be a matching of the same transactional energy with which she’s treated by her white managers. 

On a steamy day in the roaring 1920s, one of Ma’s recording sessions morphs into a tinderbox of debate on art, race, and these exploitative power dynamics that exist at their intersection. As her band awaits her characteristically late arrival, its members tease, and then bicker, and finally erupt at one another. The youngest musician, Levee (Chadwick Boseman), is the most hot-headed — in his older band-mates’ eyes, he’s an arrogant young upstart with delusions of grandeur, but Levee’s ambitions are powered by real pain, as revealed in a blistering monologue. The film is unabashedly stagy in many respects, a quality that can work both ways — but, ultimately, the crackling current that runs through Davis and Boseman’s acting gives the movie all the blazing, goosebump-inducing immediacy of a live performance.

Boseman’s performance, which was sadly his last. Levee is seemingly happy-go-lucky: he’s a ladies’ man whose penchant for nice shoes is only just eclipsed by his lifelong dream of fronting his own band. But gradually, Boseman reveals darker depths, so that Levee’s carefree attitude becomes less a hallmark of wide-eyed youth than a product of his abject cynicism about the world, something he arrived at much too young as a result of witnessing horrific racist violence. That aforementioned monologue is the trigger point for this revelation; it’s delivered with furious, tragic intensity, and is just one of the unforgettable moments Boseman gifts to the film.