The United States vs Billie Holiday, review: the tragic (and chaotic) downfall of Lady Day
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Dir: Lee Daniels. Cast: Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Garrett Hedlund, Natasha Lyonne, Miss Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Evan Ross, Tyler James Williams, Tone Bell. No cert, 130 min
The FBI couldn’t lynch Billie Holiday, but they inflicted their version of it. Their mutual antagonism began with the incendiary lyrics of Strange Fruit (“Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze…”), the breakout single she first recorded in 1939, and the authorities would breathe down her neck for the remaining 20 years she enjoyed between stardom and the grave.
The impact this official persecution had on Lady Day’s career has provided a focus for biographers lately; it was the backbone of James Erskine’s poignant doc, Billie, released last November. From the very title, it’s also posited as the main subject of The United States vs Billie Holiday, Lee Daniels’s lurching, unwieldy, fitfully interesting biopic, which stars the singer-songwriter Andra Day – the film’s impressive saving grace – in her first significant film role.
Holiday’s traumatic life certainly doesn’t lend itself to decorum, but the messy sprawl we get from Daniels (Precious, The Paperboy) throws too many stray ideas into the mix, as if everyone involved kept changing their minds about how to structure it. The playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who wrote the script, has pulled various threads together, from trials to romantic entanglements to death in police custody aged 44, but Daniels’s hectic direction rebels against getting Holiday’s story straight.
The main source isn’t any full-length book about Holiday, nor her 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, a much-queried and heavily-censored account that formed the basis of the 1972 biopic starring Diana Ross. Instead, it’s a 15-page chapter of Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, which summarised the obsessive efforts of Narcotics Bureau commissioner Harry J Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund) to pull the singer down.
In the Ross version, Holiday’s heroin addiction, frequent arrests, bisexuality and batterings at the hands of men were all sanitised to make for a more mainstream tragedy. It turned her third husband, the abusive mob enforcer Louis McKay, from whom she was estranged in her final days, into her knight in shining armour. Here, we flash back and forth, and move somewhat closer, in fits and starts, to Holiday’s own take on things: she never played the victim, but put the blame squarely on herself for a series of choices she repeatedly described as bad.
The authorities want to come at her for anti-Americanism; so they’re on permanent alert for the opening notes of Strange Fruit starting up on stage, a song Aslinger tries to ban her from playing. He despises and fears jazz as a moral danger to decent white folk everywhere, and there’s no better target than Holiday to help him link that music in the public mind with criminal depravity.
As far as the film is concerned, that’s the book closed on Harry J Anslinger, a pale stiff it doesn’t bother to render in depth. We glide equally swiftly through the 9-and-a-half months Holiday spent in jail in 1947 for drug possession, via a peculiarly kitsch montage. For the rest of her career, Holiday fights to get back the cabaret licence she needs to perform anywhere in New York City that serves alcohol. Her talent, which only seems to blaze brighter for these slings and arrows, keeps her from burning out. The restlessness of her love life is legendary, though this film only tackles her marriage to McKay (Rob Morgan), skipping over the other two in its hopscotch style.
Even so, it can’t resist superimposing a redemptive love story, as the 1972 film did. It’s a flimsy cheat, but it mysteriously works. The fiction of an affair has been built up from the mention in Hari’s chapter of a black FBI agent, Jimmy Fletcher, who was assigned to tail Holiday and confessed himself smitten in later interviews. Trevante Rhodes, with his king-size charisma, gives this role surprising wattage, and Daniels deserves credit, as do both actors, for a scorching, uninhibited sex scene that’s likely to be remembered when most of the film’s dialogue fades to nothing.
There’s no way we’ll forget Day’s performance, either. Heavy-lidded, looking and sounding a lot more like Holiday than Ross ever did, she does a fine job of conveying that pugnacious, come-at-me manner. She seems to be thinking her way deeply through the songs, which she performs tremendously herself, and captures a great deal of the scratchy magic in Holiday’s vocal inflections – the way individual words break down into gnashed syllables and moaning vowels.
When we come back to Strange Fruit, as we obviously must, the accusatory way Day’s face contorts at “the gallant South” gives the words a rivetingly sardonic bite. And her final scenes in hospital, after Holiday’s collapse from cirrhosis, have a raspy defiance that refuses all self-pity. The United States vs Billie Holiday might be all over the shop – a tatty red carpet for its much-ballyhooed star turn. But this other Lady Day still seizes her moment.
Available on Sky Cinema from Saturday
