This is a biopic of Billie Holiday. It starts shortly before her arrest for singing "Strange Fruit" and also that heroin thing. The government attempts to keep her in line after she spends a year in jail. Her life has mountainous highs and valley lows. It was a sad story but very timely in the opening of the George Floyd civil rights era. Worth the Oscar nomination.

Guide: F-word, sex, nudity (Andra Day + extras)

I did actually learn some things about Billie Holiday that I didn't know, namely that her song "Strange Fruit" was an anthem for racial injustice and that the FBI used drugs as an excuse to relentlessly pursue her so that they could arrest her and keep her from performing, thereby depriving her the opportunity to incite black audiences. That is the actually very intriguing kernel around which this biopic is structured, but it's diluted by the hot mess of this film's screenplay, that spends far too much time on Holiday's tumultuous relationships with various men in her life.

One of those men is FBI agent Jimmy Fletcher, who's assigned the task of following Holiday around and catching her out. He's black himself, and is subjected to the racial hierarchy within the department, so over time his allegiances switch to Holiday and he becomes her ally. Again, this is actually an interesting parallel story. But again, it's also diluted by everything else going on in this muddled movie.

Why, for example, is the character of Talullah Bankhead and the possible lesbian relationship she had with Holiday even in the film? That story is introduced and literally goes nowhere, as if whole sections of the movie were edited out at the last minute. And why do all the white FBI agents have to be played as caricature villains, as if we won't sympathize enough with the black people unless the white people are as cartoonishly awful as possible. And why does the screenplay feel the need to have characters just tell us what the movie's themes are without allowing us to come to conclusions ourselves? At one point, a black character tells the worst of the FBI agents that the department hates Holiday because she's black and beautiful and threatening (or words to that affect),to which my response was, "well duh."

And there are ridiculous sex scenes and lots of scenes of people using drugs and getting beat up and yelling and fighting. None of this bothered me because of the content, but rather because it all just becomes monotonous and traffics in the most tired of biopic tropes.

Andra Day gives an impressive performance that stands as probably the film's biggest asset. The Academy got it right when they nominated her for an Oscar but chose not to reward anything else about the movie.

Grade: B-

Billie Holiday was one of the greatest singers of all time. But many people don't know that she had a heroin problem, and that the US government targeted her. "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" focuses on this. As made clear, the government's persecution of Holiday was not about drugs; it was because she sang "Strange Fruit", about a lynching.

Andra Day - nominated for an Academy Award - really gets into the role of Holiday, belting out the songs with full vigor, as well as showing Holiday's personal life. She gets ample support from the rest of the cast. But in the end, the important thing to take from the movie is the US government's persecution of Holiday for daring to expose the treatment of blacks in the US. Everyone needs to know this story.

I hope to eventually see "Lady Sings the Blues" (also about Holiday).