131 min | R | February 26, 2021 | Hulu
Billie Holiday sings a song about lynching, and the federal government spends years trying to cage her for it. Andra Day vanishes into the role and sings every note herself. The performance is electric, but the movie around it never finds the same key.
Billie Holiday sings “Strange Fruit,” a song about the lynching of Black Americans, and the federal government decides she has to stop. Harry Anslinger runs the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He cannot prosecute a woman for a song, so he prosecutes her for heroin instead. The film argues that the war on drugs begins as a war on one Black artist who refuses to shut up. That thesis is sharp. The execution scatters it across two decades and too many subplots.
Andra Day plays Billie Holiday and disappears into her. She does her own singing, and the rasp and phrasing land close enough to the real thing to carry the concert scenes. Day plays the addiction without sentiment and the defiance without speeches. Trevante Rhodes plays Jimmy Fletcher, the Black federal agent sent to entrap her, and his guilt curdles into love. Garrett Hedlund plays Anslinger as a bureaucrat who hides his racism behind public health language. Natasha Lyonne plays Tallulah Bankhead and Da’Vine Joy Randolph plays Roslyn, and both fight for room in a film that keeps cutting away.
Lee Daniels directs from a script by Suzan-Lori Parks, and the two pull in opposite directions. Parks compresses an entire life into one arc and lands on a string of episodes that never accumulate force. Daniels frames everything around a 1957 magazine interview, with Leslie Jordan as the simpering journalist Reginald Lord Devine, and the editing keeps cutting back to that room just as a scene gains traction. The flashback structure flattens chronology until heroin, romance, arrest, and comeback blur into one continuous crisis. The period production design is lush, and the concert sequences let Day hold a single light and a single song. The connective tissue between those sequences is where the film falls apart.
The result is a great performance stranded in a movie that cannot decide what it is. Day gives Holiday her rage, her exhaustion, and her refusal to apologize for either. Around her the film reaches for biopic, romance, and indictment of the state, and it commits to none of the three. The argument underneath is real, because the government did hound Billie Holiday to her grave over a song about lynching. Daniels has the subject and the star, but he never finds the focus to match them.