This Lady Day deserves an Oscar
Day brings so much passion to her first film role the phrase ‘a star is born’ fits her like a long glove
The United States Vs Billie Holiday 130mins, cert 15 ★★★★✩
IN this wonderfully untoward Billie Holiday biopic, the ground-breaking jazz icon is played by Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day. The latter has something of both Lisa Bonet and Rihanna to her and brings so much passion to her first film role, for which she’s been Golden Globe nominated and seems likely to bag an Oscar nomination, that the phrase “a star is born” fits her like a long glove.
It’s 1939, and Billie is wowing the jazz clubs with her croaky, almost tipsy brand of crooning (which Day has down pat). Lady Day, however, is a rebel with a cause and her attachment to the anti-lynching ballad Strange Fruit has made her a government target. Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund), head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, thinks up a way to further his own career while destroying hers.
Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes; fantastic), a black government agent, becomes part of a high-profile sting. Several of Holiday’s lovers betray her, while her husband, Louis McKay, is revealed as a rat. The war on drugs here is a war on black people and McKay, to put it mildly, is on the wrong side.
Director Lee Daniels and scriptwriter Suzan-Lori Parks are happy to acknowledge Holiday’s self-destructive tendencies. They simply want us to view those tendencies in a new way. This Billie is never a saint. At various points she treats her pals, including the puppyish Lester Young and snarky Roslyn (Tyler James Williams and Da’Vine Joy Randolph; both effervescent) in a way that’s careless and cruel. We even get to laugh at her. There’s plenty of comic relief and something democratic about the fact that Holiday is often the butt of the joke.
Some of Daniels’s decisions are iffy: interspersed black and white footage is more distracting than useful; several set pieces are pop-video glossy and there are too many shots of a naked Day — the real Billie was undoubtedly uninhibited but the way Day’s body is framed in sex scenes is formulaic and borderline fetishistic.
Still, nothing can blunt the force of this portrayal of an artist who understood that to stand up to racism was a matter of life and death. Billie was a slippery customer. By embracing that awkward fact, Daniels and his team seize the Day.
⬤ On Sky Cinema from Saturday