Maybe each era invents the Lady Day that suits it. Lee Daniels’s new drama, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, sweeps in as a valiant corrective, starring the singer Andra Day as a complicated, impulsive, vibrant person—swearing, punching, enthusiastically bisexual, as we glean right away when she gives her lover Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne) an exuberant wink from the stage. As the film’s title suggests, it focuses on a quality absent from Lady Sings the Blues: Holiday’s political courage. In 1939, aged 23, appearing at the integrated New York nightclub Café Society, she decided to close her set with “Strange Fruit,” the protest song written by Abel Meeropol, a Communist. It’s hard to overstate the likely effect of confronting, over cocktails at a jazz club, this vivid evocation of a lynching that’s also a metaphor for a nation shot through with murderous racial injustice: “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” Her label, Columbia, wouldn’t record it. Occasionally over the years, audience members walked out or threw things; law enforcement and some club promoters warned her not to perform it, but she refused to stop.
Daniels’s film presents this refusal as the start of the campaign of surveillance and harassment she suffered from Harry Anslinger and his Federal Bureau of Narcotics (with help from several men close to her), culminating in 1959 when she was handcuffed on her deathbed in the hospital. The film’s action begins in the period surrounding her first drug arrest, in 1947, and the eponymous trial that followed, after which, set up by her agent and without legal representation, she was jailed for a year.
This bold and rebellious version of Holiday makes more intuitive sense than the 1970s one, and will be more appealing to contemporary audiences (me included). At times, though, the script by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks creaks under its own weight, as if the characters are being enlisted to tell viewers exactly how to interpret events. I lost count of how many people spell out that drugs are just a pretext for the authorities to get Holiday, when their primary motive is to punish her for “Strange Fruit.” “She’s singing it for all of us,” a mother castigates her son, the Black FBN agent Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), who’s just led the 1947 sting against Holiday. “You hate her!” Fletcher later tells his ex-colleagues. “Despite all the shit in her life, she’s made something of herself, and you can’t take it, because she’s strong, beautiful, and Black!”