The United States vs. Billie Holiday
Dir: Lee Daniels (2hrs 5mins) (15) ★★★
Billie Holiday has always been “a monster of a role”, said Mark Kennedy in The Independent. Diana Ross and Audra McDonald have both tackled it; now singer Andra Day takes it on, in her acting debut – and she shines. In a remarkable performance, she portrays the great singer in her final years as “a haunted and crushed icon, an addict with terrible choices in men but the voice of an angel”. The film flashes back and forward in time, but centres on events in 1947, when the authorities were so alarmed by the impact of her anti-lynching song Strange
Fruit, they apparently conspired to have her jailed for possessing heroin. Lee Daniels’s film is unfocused and meandering, but it’s interspersed with scenes that feel “like a punch in the gut”.
I’m sorry, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, but I couldn’t get past the “obtuse” fantasy of having Holiday fall in love with the black FBI agent (Trevante Rhodes) who was sent to infiltrate her circle – as if the man who brought her down could also offer her emotional redemption. The film is “all over the shop”, and its “superimposed” love story is a “cheat”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph, but thanks in part to Rhodes’s “king-size charisma”, the latter “mysteriously works”. Daniels and both stars deserve credit for a love scene so “scorching”, it will be remembered long after the dialogue has faded. And no one could forget Day’s performance. The film may be only “a tatty red carpet” for her star turn, “but this other Lady Day still seizes her moment”. Available on Sky Cinema.