“Wouldn’t your life be easier if you just behaved?” a journalist asks an unamused Billie Holiday, played by R&B singer Andra Day, toward the end of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Lee Daniels’s biopic about the “First Lady of the Blues.” But Billie, much to the frustration of the U. S. government, won’t behave. Specifically, she won’t stop singing “Strange Fruit,” the haunting, searing depiction of a lynching that drew attention to the unmitigated violence against black bodies in the South and terrified those in power enough that they turned the full force of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics against her.
The film’s laser focus on this slice of political-cultural history, in which the racist war on drugs collided with the set list of a musical icon, makes this retelling of the more tumultuous parts of Holiday’s life thematically distinct. But it’s Day’s magnetic portrayal that heightens this otherwise thoughtful, albeit cluttered, film. Diana Ross didn’t attempt a vocal impersonation of Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues, and the often-operatic Audra McDonald, in the stage play Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, delivered such a technically precise rendering that the impression itself distracted from the performance of the songs. But Day—making, like Ross did 50 years ago, her feature-length debut in the role—already has quite a bit of Billie in her voice.
Day’s most popular single, “Rise Up,” pulses at times with that familiar crackling vibrato, a sorrow-infused tremor that allows her to slide here into Holiday’s sound simply by thinning her powerful upper range and accessing those unmistakable vowels, somehow simultaneously harsh and warm. When Billie makes a post-incarceration comeback at Carnegie Hall, Day’s first notes summon up the palpable sense of what that moment might have felt like for the expectant, ecstatic audience. Day’s moments at the microphone are the high points of a gripping performance that resonates nearly as richly in silent smiles as in song; there’s an expressive hollowness in Billie’s eyes that conveys both a self-protective arrogance and a particularly deep self-loathing. “She looks like a million bucks, but she feels like nothing,” one of Billie’s closest confidantes (Miss Lawrence) explains, and Day captures that dichotomy with an emotional clarity that the The United States vs. Billie Holiday sometimes lacks elsewhere.
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the unsettling, unpredictable Topdog/Underdog, seems a stylistically curious pick to pen the screenplay for such a conventional biopic. The film’s structure plays according to type, a tense radio interview with a crude and callous host, Reginald Lord Devine (Leslie Jordan), giving way to a flashback as Billie recalls how the government’s frenzied obsession with “Strange Fruit” led to her imprisonment on trumped-up drug charges before her attempted return to the limelight. But even if the film’s depiction of Billie’s story feels straightforward, Parks finds some breathless surprise in the revelation of a pair of twists, each centering on betrayals that illustrate the increased instability of Billie’s world once the Feds fixate on her.
Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund), Holiday’s enemy and the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, is a racist caricature—as he very much appears to have been in real life—who announces to his team, “This jazz music is the devil’s work. That’s why this Holiday’s woman got to be stopped.” But the film’s more multidimensional semi-villains are the black agents tasked with trailing, framing, and destroying Billie and other artists, even as they themselves are denigrated and dehumanized within their offices.
In a touch of rueful irony, one such agent reveals himself to be a highly skilled jazz trumpeter as he heads out to bring down a jazz band from the inside. The interrogation of this phenomenon—and the conflicting pressures these agents face from the communities that care about them and from the colleagues who plainly do not—is the film’s most compelling subplot. Here, though, Parks loosens her aim, granting one agent (Trevante Rhodes, in a charmingly complex but ultimately underwritten role) a redemption narrative that grates against historical likelihood and lets one of the film’s most fascinating figures off too easily.
The film wrestles throughout with how to make meaning of Billie’s relationships; as the apt title suggests, it’s often the adored but eternally lonely singer against the world. Billie finds herself in a series of sometimes-overlapping foul relationships with men who will come to abuse her. Too often, though, the film introduces and develops these characters through montages or silent glances as Billie sings, and her own discomfited vagueness about what she wants from each of these relationships seeps too far into the depiction of them. Meanwhile, the film almost seems to tiptoe around the rumors, propagated by federal agents, regarding Holiday’s supposed affair with her close friend Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne)—a depiction that stands in stark contrast to the frankness with which Holiday’s sexual relationships with men, some clearly fictionalized, leave little to the imagination.
The United States vs. Billie Holiday finds its purpose most pointedly when it zeroes in on the unambiguous relationship between Billie and “Strange Fruit,” the song she can’t—and won’t—stop singing. Billie knows that the song, like a radioactive element only she controls, is both treasure and weapon. Black and white fans alike clamor for her to sing it, just as black and white members of her entourage unite in forbidding her from performing it. But Billie alone decides when she sings “Strange Fruit,” its a cappella opening, an emergence from silence, inviting her to launch this grenade without first conferring with her bandleader or announcing her intentions. A hazy, heroin-induced series of flashbacks and funhouse rooms, Parks and Daniels’s most distinctive collaborative sequence of script and staging, lead Billie to deliver the song at last in full: Only in a semi-fantasy stage space can Billie be heard in peace.
Faced with another phony arrest, nearly on her deathbed, Billie insists to a pair of F.B.I. agents, “Your grandkids will be singing ‘Strange Fruit.’” The song, indeed never forgotten, roared back to the forefront of the soundtrack of the racial justice movement when Day recorded it in 2017 in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative. Now, Day has re-enlivened not only the song but the singer who made sure everyone heard every word.
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