Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
What we have here is a small group of black musicians trying to record a record in Chicago in the 1920's. Ma is a successful singer. She has made records before and they have sold well so she is confident of her position. Levee is a talented trumpet player who just cannot stop telling everyone how he is great he is. The white guys running the recording studio are near incompetent. Basically, what we have is people bellyaching loudly and longly. 

The best part for me was seeing the mechanical recording machine. It cuts the master disk directly from the microphone. That probably amounted to less than a minute of screen time.

P.S. Denzel Washington produced this film. He has made a bunch of movies and some of them have been pretty great. This one reminds me of the movie Fences that he starred in. Not many characters, not much action, but lots of people being loudly disagreeable. I didn't care for Fences either.