Danielle Deadwyler in August Wilson's film

In Malcolm Washington's directorial debut, a reverential adaptation of August Wilson's novel The piano lesson Produced by her father Denzel Washington, actress Danielle Deadwyler is the fulcrum around which all other performances revolve.

She plays Berniece, the devoted, pragmatic co-lead in Wilson’s bracing drama about generational trauma and legacy. In this role, as in so many others, Deadwyler submits completely to her character’s will. She slips into her skin with quiet ease and, once she’s bound, finds and reveals her truth. The results are often electric.

With Berniece, Deadwyler evokes a force that connects Wilson's 1987 play, the fourth in the writer's Century Cycle, to its source. In interviews, Wilson has cited Romare Bearden's 1983 color lithograph of the same name as her inspiration. In that image, a music teacher looks over the shoulder of a student playing the piano. Their eyes convey a high level of concentration with hints of melancholy. Playing seems at once an act of duty and pleasure. What of their relationship? Who are these women to each other? Wilson imagined them as mother and daughter and The piano lesson creates the conditions that might have led to this moment and would have resulted from it. In Washington's adaptation, Berniece, when she finally sits down at the piano, has a similar look of intense concentration, as if she were becoming mother and daughter at the same time.

Before this transformation takes place, however, Washington tells us a background story. The piano lesson opens on July 4, 1911. As a white family gathers on the lawn to watch fireworks, a trio of black men work in the shadows to remove a piano from the house. The instrument is a work of art: engraved into the upper panels is a triptych depicting the history of the Charles family. Portraits of a mother and son flank the central image, which is populated by significant ancestors and their milestones. Twenty-five years later, in the summer of 1936, the piano lies intact in the home of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), where his granddaughter Berniece lives with her daughter Maretha (Skylar Smith).

No one has given the piano any serious thought for a while, until Doaker's nephew, Boy Willie (John David Washington), returns to Pittsburgh with a new plan. He wants to sell the piano so he can buy part of the Sutter family's Mississippi plantation. The purchase would be an act of rooting and reclamation. The Sutter family enslaved the Charles family and facilitated a violent separation by selling off family members to buy the piano. If Boy Willie could own part of the land, then he could reinscribe it, transforming it from a place of terror to one of personal prosperity. When he arrives in Pittsburgh with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), he bursts into the Charles house buzzing with the exhilaration of his plan.

But Berniece doesn't want to sell the piano. She still resents Boy Willie for the death of her husband Crawley (Matrell Smith) and sees her brother as all talk and trouble. The play chronicles the tensions between the siblings as they debate the future of their only family heirloom. For Berniece, the instrument represents her loneliest years with her mother, who has never recovered from the grief after the Sutters murdered Berniece and Boy Willie's father for stealing the piano. Boy Willie can only think of the piano in terms of loss and painful memories. Better to sell it and create something new.

Washington highlights the differences between Berniece and Boy Willie's relationships with the piano with flashbacks to both their childhoods. These are some of the few scenes in which the director relaxes and abandons the dutiful posture that can come from adapting a canonical text. The director also tries to make further changes, and some are more successful than others. He accentuates the spiritual and supernatural notes of Wilson's work. Elements of magical realism figure more prominently toward the end, and when they work it is largely thanks to Deadwyler. The actress plants the seeds for her character's pivotal, climactic encounter with the piano from the moment Berniece sees Boy Willie. Her character is a vision of maternal strength and sisterly responsibility, but Deadwyler delves and revels in messier feelings like anger, sadness, and vulnerability.

Other performances are highlighted by Deadwyler's Berniece, who finds herself continually at odds with a host of men seemingly indifferent to the plight of Charles' women. I wonder if there is a version of The piano lesson that starts from his perspective and moves outward, considering the maternal thread with as much urgency as the paternal one. Washington’s erratic direction seems most assured when he observes the men, connecting their current tangled repressions with the violent and racist traumas of their past. Scenes like the one in which Doaker, Boy Willie, Lymon, and Wining Boy (an excellent Michael Potts) exchange stories about their time at Parchman Prison Farm capture the emotional catharsis of a particular kind of communion.

Washington (actor, not director) gives a solid performance as Boy Willie, a character whose high energy and fast speech hide layers of pain. He’s attuned to the antics of this sly figure and confidently channels his hunger for a quick buck, but he’s less convincing when it comes to tuning into subtler registers.

Still, Deadwyler and Washington bounce off each other well. Their performances are especially dynamic when Boy Willie and Berniece negotiate the details of the family inheritance. In one surprising scene, Alexandre Desplat’s thunderous score highlights the stakes of these verbal battles. Credit must also be given to Corey Hawkins, who shines as Avery, the preacher who woos Berniece and is tasked with banishing ghosts from Charles’s house.

It is clear that Washington takes the task of adapting Wilson very seriously, and there is much to admire in this. The piano lesson. The director has assembled a strong cast, whose committed performances do justice to the playwright's famous drama. But duty can also be limiting, and there are times when The piano lesson AND pure faithful, struggling to shake off the spectre of the stage.