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‘THE UNITED STATES vs BILLIE HOLIDAY’ UNEVEN BUT WORTH SEEING, THANK YOU LEE DANIELS
By Lapacazo Sandoval, Contributing Writer
Published March 5, 2021
Andra Day stars in THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY from Paramount Pictures. Photo Credit: Takashi Seida.
Director Lee Daniels (“Precious”) has taken the audience into his imagined world of the late, great, and deeply complicated Billie Holiday aka Lady Day, in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” with a screenplay written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist Suzan-Lori Parks (“Topdog/Underdog”).
Stepping into the role of Billie is Andra Day who delivers a performance filled with power and dignity. From the start of the movie, with Holiday being slapped by her spouse (Rob Morgan)) for speaking her mind, you understand this movie is going to be raw, and perhaps hard to watch. “You can’t arrest a Nigger for singing,” says one of the White politicians who were deciding her fate, for singing
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Currently Reading The United States vs. Billie Holiday Review: Scattered but Scorching, and a Must-See for Andra Day s Performance
Lee Daniels biopic showcases Billie Holiday as a searing political artist, persecuted for singing Strange Fruit.
Owen Gleiberman, provided by
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Director: Lee Daniels
With: Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Garrett Hedlund, Leslie Jordan, Miss Lawrence, Adriane Lenox, Rob Morgan, Natasha Lyonne, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Tone Bell, Evan Ross, Tyler James Williams, Blake DeLong, Dana Gourrier, Melvin Gregg.
The gifted and mercurial Lee Daniels, director of “Precious,” is one of the only filmmakers I can think of who would dare to drop a badass-diva moment of Billie Holiday violently slapping her spouse into the middle of an otherwise giddy celebrity-singer-on-tour montage. In Daniels’ “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” Billie, played with glamorous, blowsy, dagger-eyed force by Andra Day, has had
Giddy diva worship.
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2/26/2021
Andra Day burns up the screen in her first leading role in Lee Daniels bio-drama chronicling the FBI s unabated persecution of the immortal jazz singer.
In an uncanny instance of art mirroring life, two major Hollywood movies will premiere just weeks apart, both of which depict relentless campaigns by American government intelligence agencies to silence influential Black voices. They follow closely after an impeachment trial in which the majority of GOP senators showed their complicity in violence from white supremacist groups by voting to acquit the Instigator in Chief. That packs scalding heat into the simultaneous arrival of