General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Piano Lesson (2024 film)

The Piano Lesson is a 2024 American drama film directed by Malcolm Washington in his feature directorial debut, adapted from August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 play of the same name. It stars Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, Corey Hawkins, and Erykah Badu, and was produced by Denzel Washington and Todd Black for Netflix.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Malcolm Washington (feature debut); screenplay by Malcolm Washington and Virgil Williams, from Wilson's play¹
Source	August Wilson's 1987 play, the fourth work in his Pittsburgh Cycle and a Pulitzer Prize winner²
Setting	1936 Pittsburgh, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, mostly in the household of Doaker Charles³
Release	World premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on August 31, 2024; select theaters November 8, 2024; Netflix streaming November 22, 2024⁴^•⁵
Runtime / rating	2 hours 5 minutes; rated PG-13³
Critical reception	88% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (133 reviews); Metascore 69 on Metacritic based on 40 critic reviews³^•⁶
Place in a series	The third August Wilson film adaptation produced by Denzel Washington, after Fences (2016) and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020)⁷

Spoilers

Plot and source material

The film follows the Charles family in 1936 Pittsburgh as they fight over an heirloom piano. The brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), plans to build the family fortune by selling the instrument; the sister, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), refuses to give up what she sees as the sole vestige of the family's heritage. Their uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson) tries to mediate.¹

The piano itself carries the family's history: it is decorated with carvings made by an enslaved ancestor, and Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy the Mississippi land on which their ancestors once toiled as slaves.³^•⁷ The Associated Press describes the result as both an impassioned family drama and a profound ghost story, in which the wrangling over the piano becomes a reckoning with the family's past and the legacy of slavery.⁷ Berniece's husband Crawley died years before the story begins, and she blames Boy Willie for his death, a further stress point between the siblings.²

Wilson wrote the play as the fourth work of his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle (also called the American Century Cycle), one play for each decade of twentieth-century Black American life, mostly set in Pittsburgh's historically Black Hill District.²^•⁸ The play takes its name from a painting by the artist Romare Bearden, whose work was a frequent inspiration for Wilson.⁹

Production

A family production. Denzel Washington has a standing agreement with August Wilson's estate to bring the playwright's cycle to the screen; he directed and starred in Fences and produced Ma Rainey's Black Bottom before handing the directing reins on The Piano Lesson to his son Malcolm.¹⁰^•⁷ The Washington family involvement runs deep: John David Washington plays Boy Willie, his sister Olivia Washington and mother Pauletta Washington appear in the cast, and his sister Katia is among the producers.¹¹

Malcolm Washington prepared by researching Wilson's life and archives, visiting the Hill District and the restored August Wilson House, and studying the historical context of 1936 Pittsburgh. He has said the aim was to honor the spirit of the play without transcribing it directly to the screen.¹² He cited the painter Kerry James Marshall, along with Toni Morrison, Noah Davis, and Kahlil Joseph, as visual touchstones, and wanted the story to reveal itself gradually in the manner of Marshall's Invisible Man series.¹²

Casting from the stage. Four cast members arrived on set directly from the 2022 Tony-nominated Broadway revival of the play, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson: Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker), John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon), and Michael Potts (Wining Boy). Danielle Deadwyler took the role of Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks on Broadway.¹⁰^•¹³ Jackson's own history with the play reaches back to its original 1987 run, when he played Boy Willie.¹⁴

Shooting. Although the story is set in Pittsburgh, the film was shot on a set in Atlanta, where Washington and production designer David J. Bomba re-created the Hill District circa 1936, working from period photographs because so much of the play takes place around a dining room table.¹⁵^•¹⁰ Washington shot the film in sequence, a practice he described as rare in modern filmmaking, and worked with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis on a visual language of light, darkness, and shadow.¹⁶ The score was composed by Alexandre Desplat.¹

Reception

The film premiered at the 51st Telluride Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival before its November theatrical and streaming release.⁴^•¹⁷ Critics were broadly positive: Rotten Tomatoes recorded an 88% Tomatometer from 133 reviews, with a critics consensus calling the film "a Southern Gothic played at a ferocious key" with "an outstanding ensemble," while audience scores were lower at 65%.³ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 69 based on 40 critic reviews, with 70% positive and 30% mixed and no negative reviews.⁶

Reviewers singled out Deadwyler's performance as Berniece. Time called her the film's true anchor, "forged largely from fire and iron," while noting that the film's rhythms occasionally falter in a debut director's ambitious project.² The Guardian praised the setpiece in which the men break into the prison song "Berta, Berta," but found the adaptation powerful yet patchy and confined by its stage origins.¹⁸ The Washington Post's review was more critical, calling the film handsome but stagey and objecting to supernatural visitations that it argued play more believably on stage.¹⁹

Awards

The film accumulated 26 wins and 57 nominations.²⁰ Deadwyler won the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress and was nominated for the Critics Choice, Chicago Film Critics, Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics, and Satellite Awards in supporting categories.²⁰ The ensemble cast received an Ensemble Tribute at the 2024 Gotham Awards, where the film was also a nominee, and Malcolm Washington and Virgil Williams won the Excellence in Writing Award at the Denver Film Festival.¹²^•²⁰ At the NAACP Image Awards the film received 2 wins and 14 nominations, and it took 4 wins from 12 nominations at the Black Reel Awards.⁶

Context in the Wilson screen project

The Piano Lesson is part of Denzel Washington's effort to adapt all ten plays of Wilson's cycle for the screen, a mission he says began when Wilson's widow Costanza asked him to shepherd the plays.⁷ It is the third such adaptation, following Fences (2016), which Washington directed and starred in, and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020).¹⁰ The Atlantic noted that the film largely stays faithful to Wilson's vision while infusing the story with more modern sensibilities than previous takes, in order to introduce it to new generations; the final credits even play a Frank Ocean song, "Wither," rather than a period jazz number.⁹ An earlier screen version of the play, a 1995 made-for-television movie directed by Lloyd Richards, preceded it.²¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026