The Piano Lesson review – Washington family get stuck into August Wilson’s powerful play

Eight years ago, as producer-director and star, Denzel Washington gave us an intelligent and deeply felt film version of August Wilson’s stage play Fences, a rich and resonant evocation of African American history. Now as co-producer only, Washington has brought another Wilson play to the screen, another weighty legacy project, perhaps. The Piano Lesson is the fifth in Wilson’s epic Pittsburgh cycle, adapting the recent Broadway production with most of the main cast. It’s another beautifully acted piece of work – though with a startling, even slightly baffling element of the supernatural, a melodramatic séance of strangeness that might have worked better on stage.

Denzel’s son Malcolm Washington makes his feature directing debut, co-writing with Virgil Williams, while Malcolm’s brother John David Washington stars as swaggering, ambitious, but emotionally wounded former sharecropper Boy Willie in 1930s Pittburgh, who has a plan to bully his sister Berniece (the perennially excellent Danielle Deadwyler) into giving him the family piano so he can sell it and buy the land he used to farm back in the south.

Nobody in this film gives or receives a piano lesson in the conventional sense. Here the piano is itself the lesson, yet the lesson is difficult to understand. It’s a piano which is carved with images of the family’s ancestors from slave times and a talismanic object for Berniece, though she somehow cannot bear to play it. Her emotional life is paralysed and her soul cannot sing. Should she simply let Boy Willie sell it for cash, abandon those burdensome memories, and let her family start their upward social climb? Or does the piano have a real value above and beyond all of this?

We arrive at a classic Wilson household: a family kitchen table around which there will be many an argument, anecdote, confrontation, song or tear-and-laughter-filled reconciliation. Samuel L Jackson plays the wise but peppery Doaker, whose widowed niece Berniece and her young daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) live with him. Doaker is indulgently amused when Boy Willie, his ne’er-do-well nephew, shows up at dawn with his innocent, sweet-natured friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), full of big plans which exasperate and infuriate Berniece; she (perhaps unjustly) blames Boy Willie for a quasi-criminal escapade that ended in her husband’s death.

Other visitors to the house include Avery (Corey Hawkins), another southern incomer and neighbourhood kid whose new career as a preacher is the subject of derisive astonishment from Boy Willie. (Perhaps even Berniece doesn’t quite believe it, hence her hesitant response to Avery’s proposal of marriage.) Doaker’s elder brother Wining Boy – a wonderfully vivid performance from Michael Potts – is a former singer, piano player and good-time guy who has now settled into a good-humoured retirement, with fits of boozy melancholy. All these people are to be stirred by Boy Willie’s sudden appearance, bringing with him rumours that he actually killed the white landowner and slavemaster descendant whose ghost now appears in Doaker’s house.

Really? Yes, really. The film’s climax is very gothic, and though the film is clearly inviting us to read the ghost as metaphor, it has also has to be taken literally at some level, and I wondered if the story needed this at all when the non-ghost aspects of the drama are much more powerful. The ensemble cast work wonderfully and intuitively together; I loved the surges of emotion, and then the palate-cleansing moments of silence and calm. The song is a tremendous setpiece and the dialogue has a music of its own.

• The Piano Lesson is in cinemas from 8 November, and Netflix from 22 November.