Rent The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021)

Great acting and soundtrack - The United States vs. Billie Holiday review by TH

This is a rather engaging film which explores parts of her life and the controversy around her song 'strange fruit' and drug addiction.

The acting is great and Andra Day who has a great voice does a good job at singing these songs.

As a whole this is another biopic film where the acting outshines the film itself. Not to say this a bad film but it felt a bit unfocused at times.

Good Acting Performance - The United States vs. Billie Holiday review by CD

I thought this film might be hard to watch, and so it proved to be.  Andra Day shines in the role and one longs to see more song performances.  Instead, as the title suggests, the film focuses on the political, racial and drug related issues, together with an unsettling array of rather menacing characters in grim situations. It’s no surprise that this is a 2021 film, and it sets out to tell a tragic story of racial discrimination and aggression against an amazing artist.  Well worth a watch.

Overly-Political BLM Biopic which is really about the War on Drugs rather than Billie Holiday - The United States vs. Billie Holiday review by PV

The best biopic about Billie Holiday is LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1972) - a movie which succeeds in making Diana Ross almost likeable.

This film is about drugs, specially the socalled war on drugs, which has been going on for over a century in the ever-Puritan USA, starting perhaps with Prohibition 1920-33. African-Americans - as black people are called now, or N-groes as they used to be called by white and black alike in America (I use the hyphen to placate the snowflake censors...) - were a target for the war on drugs, because for whatever reason, their inner city communities is where drug use happened a lot.

Though it did happen amongst well-off whites - remember Cole Porter's I GET A KICK OUT OF YOU and its mention of cocaine, or how Judy Garland et all were injected or pilled up to give them that ZING. But if you research it, a lot of black musicians and actors too from the 1920s and 30s got into heroin especially - a lot of black child stars in those 1930s US films did. Why? Poverty? Bad upbringings? Well Louis Armstrong was born in a brothel and grew up there like Billie but did not fall victim of drink and drugs like her and others.

ANYWAY this is based on the non-fiction book CHASING THE DREAM by Johann Hari, a white British gay former journalist who used to write for The Independent until 2011 when he was exposed as plagiarising some of his articles and fabricating interviews etc in others - his Orwell award was withdrawn for that. I have not read the book but that is the source for this film - a book by a white British man.

What annoyed me most here was the reference to STRANGE FRUIT as Billie Holiday's song. Well yes, she sang it as her trademark song BUT did not write it, or any songs.

STRANGE FRUIT words and music were written by a white Jewish man Abel Meeropol (1903 –1986)whose songs were often published under his pseudonym Lewis Allan. Like Leiber and Stoller, white Jewish boys, who wrote most of the early Elvis hits, and at age 19 wrote HOUND DOG for black female Willie Mae Big Mama Thornton - in which she scolds her man (so 2 teenage white Jewish boys wrote as a black woman! Reminds me of NATURAL WOMAN, lyrics by a man). The Elvis version sold 10 million copies.

This film is too long and too political for me, like a BLM-approved flick - the predictable GASP moments of lynching are there, and it does seem sometimes like a lecture or even sermon as SO many woke political films do - as if they are yelling at us YOU SEE,. RACISM IS BAD. No, really?

What annoys me most is this VERY American culture gets imported and grafted onto the UK which has never had race laws, segregation, or lynching (actually whites were lynched too in the USA at times, in 18th and 19th C, via various immigrant groups fighting or attacks on Brits - no films about that).

The music however is great - a shame about so much padding and the political posturing, and the love triangle stuff drawn out.

3 stars