Billie Holiday was the outstanding female jazz vocalist from the last century. She might not have hit as many notes as Ella Fitzgerald but delivered the words she sang like no one else. Her vulnerability was shielded by a tough skin; her singing was warm but emotionally at arm’s length; every lyric was crafted, not polished but with rough edges that caught some of her joy, sadness and hurt.
It’s a hard role to play convincingly (Diana Ross fell short in Lady Sings the Blues) but Andra Day shines in The United States vs. Billie Holiday. Although the film is a stylistic mess, with director Lee Daniels tossing ideas into a blender helter-skelter, Day is pitch perfect as Holiday. She looks the part, lit from behind in flowing gowns with a flower in her hair. In a much more challenging accomplishment, Day’s singing comes close to Holiday and her offstage characterizations of the singer are entirely plausible. Ill used by many people in her life, men and women, black or white, Holiday was distrustful, her occasional haughtiness a protective façade.
Holiday’s career was a dangerous rollercoaster of ups and sheer descents, cycles of heroin addiction alternating with precarious freedom from narcotics. The United States vs. Billie Holiday is better at showing the ecstasy than the agony, yet it understands why Holiday desired the warm, lulling sensation of shooting up. She found that the pain of being creative—and Black—was difficult to bear in the world where she lived.
The United States vs. Billie Holiday focuses on the importance of one song in her repertoire, “Strange Fruit.” The poem about lynching in “the gallant South,” set to an elegantly understated melody, helped stir the conscience of many well-heeled patrons of New York’s Café Society (where some of the film’s best scenes are set). It also brought her the unwanted attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Bureau of Narcotics Director Harry Anslinger.
While Hoover is unseen in the film except as a portrait on the walls of police bureaucrats, Anslinger is the key motivating character in the drama. He’s played by Garrett Hedlund as a malicious twit, obsessed with bringing down the singer of this “unAmerican” song whose lyric will only stir up trouble. All true, except the real Anslinger was too much of a square to haunt the jazz clubs as his cinematic stand-in does in the film.
The sharpest point made by The United States vs. Billie Holiday is correct and needs to be understood. The “War on Drugs” (a term used anachronistically in the screenplay) was primarily launched against America’s racial minorities. Led by Anslinger, it was a fear-based crusade drawing from America’s Puritanical anxiety over intoxication and its color-coded horror of losing control over its Black and Brown citizens. Not addressed in the film was Anslinger’s one lead role in demonizing marijuana during the 1930s. Heroin of course is a different matter, yet the scrutiny Anslinger and his minions directed toward the drug was inextricably linked to its use by (mostly) Black jazz musicians. In the film, Holiday wants hospitalization for the sickness of addiction. Instead, she receives a prison sentence.
