Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The United States Vs. Billie Holiday’ on Hulu, a Flawed Biopic With a Stunning Performance By Andra Day

Hulu’s The United States Vs. Billie Holiday has all the stuff of an awards-season contender — biopic of a beloved icon, relevant subject matter, great music, director with Oscar noms, explosive lead performance — but it may not find much traction in this year’s Oscar race. It snagged a couple of Golden Globe nods, including one for breakout star Andra Day, but the credibility of such a claim continues to dwindle. Director Lee Daniels hasn’t seen any Oscar love since Precious, and there seems to be a fair amount of biopic fatigue among Academy voters and audiences alike. So maybe it’s best if we watch this movie in a vacuum, and see it if turns up some solid drama and insight into the irrepressible Ms. Holiday.

THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 1957. Billie Holiday (Day) sits down for an interview with an old white lady who flatters her up and down, then cluelessly asks her, “What’s it like to be a colored woman?” Billie stares daggers into her. You get the feeling you’re about to see exactly what it’s like to be a colored woman in mid-century America: Flashback 10 years. Billie’s being targeted by the FBI because she keeps singing Strange Fruit, the harrowing song about the lynching of Black people in the South. It made her a star in the late ’30s, and now, in the post-war States, she’s a jazz icon. FBI wingnut Harry J. Anslinger (Garret Hedlund) drops the N-word in a meeting with other Caucasian male law-enforcement honchos; he explains that jazz is the product of the devil, and says he plans to bust Billie Holiday because he knows she’s a drug user.

Between concerts, Billie shoots up and nods off with her bandmates and friends. Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes) wiggles backstage in his military uniform and pals up with her — but it’s a front. He’s part of the FBI sting operation. She takes the stage in Philadelphia, sees a line of cops standing in the back of the room patting their billy clubs and goes fully defiant, launching a cappella into Strange Fruit. She’s arrested. Between “inciting a riot” and drug possession, she’s sent to jail for a year. Jimmy feels twinges of guilt; he’s one of the first Black men working for the FBI, but he’s also just a pawn for Anslinger, a racist POS.

When Billie’s released, she struggles to find work in New York due to having her cabaret license revoked. She books a tour and hits the road, and Jimmy’s tasked with following her. In a keep-your-friends-close-but-your-enemies-closer move, she treats him like another member of the tour crew. She kicked the drugs while in prison, but is back on the shit to the point where the band gripes that she’s blowing her dough on blow instead of paying them. The Jimmy thing becomes irresistible, forming a very pointy triangle with her abusive husband, Louis McKay (Rob Morgan). She sure seems to be on a road to ruin, and the FBI’s insistence on making an example out of her only makes her go that much faster.

Along the way, we get scenes of Billie doting on her dogs, partying with her friends, parrying with the feds, wrestling her demons and generally putting up with no shit whatsoever from anyone. She’s hard and angry and confident and talented and smart and more than a little bit broken. She also sings, showing the purity of her soul. She would die young, and we already know that. The hottest, brightest flames always burn out the fastest.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The United States Vs. Billie Holiday is in many ways a typical melodrama-biopic along the lines of middling stuff like Get On Up or Bohemian Rhapsody. The 2020 documentary Billie — also on Hulu — might offer more insight.

Performance Worth Watching: Day slashes through the clutter — an unfocused screenplay, Daniels’ direction — like a machete, her performance strong, assured and frequently searing.

Memorable Dialogue: Billie’s affectionate sendoff to Jimmy: “See you in church, soldier boy.”

Sex and Skin: Plenty: Day is topless in a few scenes; she and Rhodes participate in a fairly graphic, hard-R-style sex scene.

Our Take: In marked contrast to Day’s highly concentrated, mesmerizing work, The United States Vs. Billie Holiday is a sloppy, sloppy movie. It jumps timelines pointlessly. Thinly rendered supporting characters flit in and out of the story. The Jimmy character is wan and underdeveloped, in spite of Rhodes’ easy charisma. It halfheartedly addresses the stigma of drug addiction. It never fully cultivates the tragedies of Billie’s life, the things that made her the troubled adult she was, into the subtext. It frames Anslinger as a bland villain. And it tends to skimp on the context, never truly addressing the complex dynamic of Black artists getting rich by bending to the will of white power brokers; there’s only a tossed-off line about how Billie should “be more like Ella Fitzgerald” in the way she manages herself.

Much of the film’s problems stem from Daniels’ direction, which is a grab-bag of ideas and styles haphazardly edited together. He uses choppy cuts one minute and soft dissolves the next. Unnecessary visual flourishes often get in the way of Day’s simple and direct manner of delivering human drama. The film’s most effective sequence is a surreal, hallucinatory flashback within the context of a profound heroin high. It’s followed by Day’s showstopping performance of Strange Fruit, which will leave scorch marks on the back wall of your living room. Oddly, those two moments feel out of step with the rest of the bland hodgepodge of scenes, many of which are rote biopic fodder.

And yet, Day is so explosively great here, you’ll be hard-pressed to give up on this thing. Even though the Billie character is threadbare in places, and the love story is underdeveloped, and her relationships with her husband and close friends and fellow musicians are hastily sketched, she’s riveting. Bold. Fearless. Oscar-caliber stuff. Billie Holiday deserves a better movie, but she’d be hard-pressed to find an actress better-suited to play her.

Our Call: I harbor so many reservations with this movie. It’s a mess. But should you see it just for Andra Day? I think so. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The United States Vs. Billie Holiday on Hulu