It's a movie called The United States Vs. Billie Holiday , so you know there must be a battle at stake. And there is. Lee Daniels ' new movie, which stars a charismatically downplayed Andra Day as the titular, completely singular, and in many ways unknowable Lady Day, is set primarily in the 1940s. It tells the story of Holiday's life and career in the wake of the song "Strange Fruit" — her elegy to Black lives lost to decades of lynching in the long aftermath of the Reconstruction — making the airwaves, filling concert halls, and pissing off certain people. Among the aggrieved: the U.S. government. And one J. Edgar Hoover. So, no, this is no straightforward biopic. Billie Holiday tracks two stories at once, much like Sam Pollard's MLK/FBI and Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah , which, like Daniels' film, are attempts to unbury essential conflicts in the history of Black political activism and, to the extent that movies can be trusted as historical record of any kind, put them on the record. For all three of these films to be given such confrontationally binary titles — titles that evoke political warfare — is telling. It… Read full this story
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‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’ Fails to Take Into Account the Life of the Woman We Still Love have 354 words, post on www.rollingstone.com at February 26, 2021. This is cached page on Movie Breaking News. If you want remove this page, please contact us.