J. Edgar Hoover has a lot to answer for.
He’s name-checked but never actually seen in director Lee Daniels’ harrowing study of jazz chanteuse Billie Holiday’s final tempestuous decade, available via Hulu. But Hoover’s spirit hovers over an early back-room meeting that includes Sen. Joseph McCarthy (Randy Davison), Roy Cohn (Damian Joseph Quinn), Congressman John E. Rankin (Robert Alan Beuth), Congressman J. Parnell Thomas (Jeff Corbett) and a gaggle of other sclerotic, racist martinets determined to make America safe for their wealthy white friends and colleagues.
By — in this case — removing Holiday from the equation.
Despite having been assured by her attorney that she'll be sent to a rehab hospital,
Billie Holiday (Andra Day) is horrified to hear the judge sentence her to "a year and a day"
at West Virginia's Alderson Federal Prison Camp.
Not a difficult task, given that her well-publicized heroin habit dovetails nicely with the “war on drugs” championed ruthlessly by U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund, much too young for this key role).
The concern — a primary focus of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ screenplay, adapted from a chapter in journalist Johann Hari’s non-fiction dissection of the war on drugs, Chasing the Scream — is that Holiday’s signature song, “Strange Fruit,” is “stirring up the masses” (Black and white, it should be mentioned).
And, Lord knows, we can’t have that.
Daniels’ film is anchored by star Andra Day’s all-in, absolutely mesmerizing portrayal of Holiday: as astonishing an impersonation as could be imagined, even more so given that this is Day’s starring debut. And yes, to anticipate the obvious question: She does all of her own singing … and her replication of Holiday’s ragged, whiskey-soaked, gravel-on-grit delivery is equally impressive.
That said, Day isn’t similarly well served by Daniels’ slow, clumsy film, or by some of the odd narrative choices in Parks’ script: most notably a weird framing device involving flamboyantly gay radio journalist Reginald Lord Devine (Leslie Jordan, as a wholly fictitious character), which sets up the flashback that bounces us to February 1947.
It’s a celebratory evening, with Holiday performing before an enthusiastic sell-out crowd at New York’s Café Society, the country’s first racially integrated nightclub. The audience includes Holiday’s friend and occasional lover, Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne); her husband Jimmy Monroe (Erik LaRay Harvey); and worshipful ex-soldier Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes).
Backstage, we meet Holiday’s loyal family unit: stylist Miss Freddy (Miss Lawrence); hairdresser Roslyn (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), also charged with caring for Billie’s beloved dogs; trumpeter — and frequent heroin partner — Joe Guy (Melvin Gregg); and saxophonist Lester “Prez” Young (Tyler James Williams, all grown up from his TV days in Everybody Hates Chris).
The care and attention they pay each other is genuinely touching, throughout the entire film. They’re far more attentive and compassionate than husband Jimmy: merely one of many examples, as we’ll see, of Holiday’s lamentable taste in men.
As of this moment, she’s under strict Federal orders not to sing “Strange Fruit” during any public performances (a jaw-dropping abuse of government authority that’s difficult to imagine today, but which actually took place). The omnipresent Anslinger, frequently accompanied by the silent, reptilian Agent Carter (Blake DeLong), knows full well how much Holiday wants to sing that song, and that eventually she’ll succumb.
Anslinger will be ready, with an army of cops.
His determination to metaphorically lynch Holiday — over a song that condemns lynching (irony obviously intentional) — is one of several narrative threads weaving in and out of each other. The other primary element concerns Fletcher, whose affable, admiring manner soon grants him access to Holiday’s inner circle, and perhaps even to her heart.
Alas, he turns out to be an undercover Fed, planted by Anslinger to help nail Holiday. (Your sense of déjà vu is well placed; we did just see this scenario in Judas and the Black Messiah.)
Rhodes has perhaps the most difficult character arc, because it’s important that we continue to regard Fletcher sympathetically (not easy, initially). This initial betrayal apparently is “excused” by Fletcher’s pride at having become the Bureau’s first Black agent of consequence, but that’s a pyrrhic victory at best; he and his modest section — all Black faces — are relegated to a basement, and flat-out shunned whenever they venture upstairs.
(Are we to imagine that the rest of the FBI is staffed entirely by regressive, racist trolls? I suppose that’s possible, if J. Edgar did all the hiring. Still, it feels like overkill here.)
The trouble is that Rhodes plays Fletcher with too much intelligence and compassion; it’s hard to imagine him burying these finer qualities beneath naked ambition, even if he does eventually come to his senses. On top of which, very little is known about the actual Fletcher, so much of what occurs here is speculation on Parks’ part … although, in fairness, it adds some welcome emotional depth and a kinder, gentler subtext.
Most of the film’s best moments deservedly belong to Day, whose Billie is both feisty and vulnerable, defiant but wretchedly subservient to a series of cruel and opportunistic men: none worse than Tone Bell’s greedy, abusive John Levy, owner of New York City’s Ebony Club (and perhaps a worse villain than Anslinger).
Day breathes heart and palpable, soul-deep pain into well-placed renditions of Holiday’s most famous songs: “All of Me,” “Solitude,” “T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness,” “Them There Eyes,” “Lover Man” and, yes, “Lady Sings the Blues,” among many others. Daniels and Parks tease us, as their film proceeds, and we wonder if Billie ever will grant “Strange Fruit” its place in the spotlight.
“I gotta be pretty high to sing that one,” she tells one fan, who shouts out the request.
That line prompts a nervous smile, particularly since we know the statement is false. This entire film is about Holiday’s insistence on using that song — one of this country’s first true protest anthems — as a means of speaking truth to power. Re-casting Holiday as a civil rights icon certainly is more satisfying than the harsher “troubled jazz singer and drug addict” descriptor with which she usually has been tagged.
And yet other elements of Daniels’ film are less satisfying. Anslinger — and particularly Carter — are little more than menacing, one-dimensional cartoons. Learning that Anslinger loathes jazz in general, and regards such music as a danger to American purity, scarcely helps; it simply makes him guilty of bad taste, on top of everything else.
Context is needed: We wonder (for example) what he must be thinking, in one telling scene, about the fact that his wife clearly admires and adores Holiday. Parks’ script plants this provocative seed — and others — but fails to let them germinate.
(A closing archival news clip — after the film concludes — that shows President John F. Kennedy honoring Anslinger with an award for his “government service,” is more powerfully loathsome than anything Hedlund brings to his performance.)
A couple sex scenes also feel needlessly, gratuitously exploitative: even allowing for the fact that a latter one speaks volumes about how Holiday views her role in a physical relationship. On the other hand, Day’s rebellious display of nudity, earlier on, starkly — and quite properly — illustrates Holiday’s righteous fury over the indignity of that particular moment.
It’s telling that Day earned this film’s sole Academy Award nomination; she’s far better than her oddly unsatisfying surroundings. Granted, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is far more honest and authentic than the pop-culture treatment in 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues … but it’s still flawed.
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