Andra Day shines in overstuffed Billie Holiday biopic
Billie Holiday has always been a monster of a role. Diana Ross tackled her on film and Audra McDonald did it on stage. Now it’s time for Andra Day — a singer and actress perfectly named to play Lady Day — and she shines. It’s a pity the film she’s in is so messy.
In the frustrating “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” Day gives it her all as Holiday but she can’t save a film that is overstuffed and also thin. Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks offer an unfocused, meandering work for much of the time, interrupted by devastating scenes that feel like a punch to the gut.
Day plays Holiday in the last years of her life as a haunted and crushed icon, an addict with terrible choices in men but the voice of an angel. Day’s body is angular and lean and seemingly always prepared for blows to rain down, a piece of gum and a cigarette ever-present in her mouth. But she is also liable to punch back and rip into anyone crossing her. It is a remarkable performance, not least because it is Day’s first acting role.
Daniels and Park have chosen as their skeleton an unlikely love affair between Holiday and Jimmy Fletcher, a Black federal agent ordered to infiltrate her group and get her arrested for using heroin. Why? Because whites cannot stand her singing the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit.”
The material is adapted from Johann Hari’s “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.” It’s now the third recent movie project to show government infiltration of Black leaders, following the “MLK/FBI” documentary and the film “Judas and the Black Messiah.”
The film suffers a stuttering start — and the introduction of a poor framing device with a sit-down Holiday interview — before going back in time 10 years and tracing the toll drugs and abuse slowly take on an increasingly haggard Holiday, leading to her death in 1959.
The natural villain in this piece would be the agent who rats out Holiday several times before falling in love with her. The filmmakers haven’t quite figured him out. Why would Holiday allow a federal agent who has helped arrest her twice back into her life? “It’s complicated,” she says.
The real bad guy is Federal Bureau of Narcotics leader Harry J. Anslinger (a mustache-twirling Garrett Hedlund), who is a virulent racist and cartoonishly unsubtle about it. “This jazz music is the devil’s work. That’s why this Holiday woman has got to be stopped,” he says. “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” a Hulu release, is rated R for drug use, domestic violence, language, nudity and mature themes.
Running time: 130 minutes.