Troy doesn’t want anyone to enjoy the success he was denied, and that includes his teenage son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), who has an interview scheduled with a college football recruiter.

When he dismisses the new black players - and Robinson himself - with a righteous harrumph, claiming that he’s better than all of them, his gripe is rooted in an honest perception of the racist past, but it’s also rooted in the bigheaded wrath of his own ego.

He never found fortune or fame from baseball, and he can’t accept that the game is now opening up for others. He was once a professional baseball player, a star of the Negro Leagues, but it was Troy’s bitter fate to come along a generation before Jackie Robinson. Which, as we learn, is just what Troy is.

And Washington tears through it with a joyful ferocity, like a man possessed. Wilson’s dialogue is a marvel - soulful, naturalistic, and profane, at moments downright musical in the snap of its cadences. Much of “Fences” is set in the Maxsons’ small, cramped patch of backyard, but the film doesn’t feel stagy, because Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s cinematography gives it a crystal-clear flow, and Washington, as both actor and director, gets the conversation humming with a speed and alacrity that keeps the audience jazzed. Troy is so thrifty he claims he can’t afford a TV set, but he has carved out a secure life for his family rooted in their modest brick house. He’s a man shrewd enough to keep his head down and feisty enough to have just asked his supervisor why Pittsburgh has no black sanitation drivers (a chancy question that winds up netting him a promotion to be the city’s first).

He’s devoted to Rose ( Viola Davis), his wife of 18 years, and the sauciness of their back-and-forth teasing lets you know that the feeling is mutual. Troy works as a trash collector, and when we first see him, finishing his Friday shift and coming home to greet the weekend the way he always does, by sharing a pint of gin with his grizzled co-worker, Bono (Stephen Henderson), he seems an ebullient and centered man. The central character, Troy Maxson, is a bedraggled patriarch with a backbone of pride that rules and defines him.

Denzel washington august wilson