Andra Day in “The United States vs.Billie Holiday.” (Takashi Seida/Hulu)
As the telling of the story goes in the sometimes overwrought but searing and memorably impactful “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” the government didn’t really care about the troubled singer with the voice of an angel shooting heroin as she toured the country.
The drug abuse – that was simply the means of getting to Holiday. That was the rationale for devoting an inordinate amount of time and manpower to harassing her, infiltrating her inner circle, arresting her, sending her off to prison when a rehabilitation facility would have been more beneficial, attempting to plant evidence on her, hounding her every move literally to the day she died. What the feds really wanted to do was get her to stop singing that damn song: the haunting and scathing mood piece “Strange Fruit,” which told the story of the obscene epidemic of lynchings in the South and served as a wake-up call every time Holiday sang it, especially to the whites in the audience who came to see a beloved entertainer and didn’t expect to have their comfortable sensibilities challenged and shaken to the core.