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Describing the central conflict in
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, between her titular diva and Chadwick Boseman’s ambitious trumpeter, star Viola Davistells EW that “Levee represents everything that is antithetical towards [Ma’s] belief system. He is representative of a new phase of music that will render her extinct, for lack of a better term. He is unruly and undisciplined. I think that makes her uneasy. She sees him sexually as a threat too, to women that she has in her life.”
Throughout the Netflix film (now streaming), an adaptation of the August Wilson play, Levee plots against his boss Ma Rainey (Davis), trying to get their white record producer to force his new arrangement of her song upon her, and making moves on her paramour Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige). Little does he know though that the Mother of the Blues always gets her way in the end.