The costumes and overall historical production design looks good, and Andra Day is great playing Billie Holiday, but otherwise "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" is a meandering, poorly-constructed biopic. That despite the reflexive framing of the story as a recorded interview that should've focused the narrative besides reflecting the audial sensation of Holiday's singing.
Instead, we get a plot that often doesn't seem to be going anywhere besides from scene to scene of shooting up heroin, from concert to concert and abuse or sex scenes from man to man, with a hint of bisexuality. A wallowing, hot-mess portrait of Lady Day. All the while, cut occasionally to narcs planting evidence or saying something racist and inevitably being told off to presumed audience cheering. Even if the remembered scenes of Holiday's past as the black FBI agent follows her from a lynching through her upbringing in a brothel is almost effective, the montage covering again the aforementioned sort of scenes we've already seen several times in slight variations, plus some fight between two guys, certainly isn't. And to top it off there's that atonal, fourth-wall-breaking mid-credits scene after the requisite biopic text at the end to give us the Wikipedia headlines of what happened to the characters after the movie.
Yet, Day is great, an actual singer who sings the part and in the imitated style of the character she's performing. Her reported weight loss and picking up of smoking and drinking for the part is some impressive dedication, too, even if she wisely didn't go to Nick Nolte levels of method acting in using heroin as he did for "The Good Thief" (2002). Day deserved better direction, the social commentary on civil rights deserved more than simplistic tropes, "Strange Fruit" better than "Tigress and Tweed," and Holiday a more focused biographical picture.
I'll have to check out "Lady Sings the Blues" (1972), which stars Diana Ross and also received awards attention, someday for comparison.
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