Some biopics exceed expectations by merging a compelling story with insightful character moments that allow us to better understand a historical figure’s life and struggle. Others feature a lead actor giving it their all but either make the historical story feel conventional or struggle to give it coherence. Lee Daniels’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday sadly fits into the latter category. 

The title refers to the infamous 1947 court case in which famed singer Billie Holiday (Andra Day) was put on trial for drug possession as the result of a raid overseen by Federal Bureau of Narcotics director Harry J. Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund). While Holiday was indeed an addict, drugs were just the legal excuse for Anslinger’s crusade against the famed singer beyond her race and bisexuality. Specifically, he wanted to prevent her from publicly singing “Strange Fruit,” a harrowing tune that describes a Southern lynching in meticulous detail. This obsession would literally hound Holiday until her dying breath in 1959—passing away at 44 while chained to a hospital bed—because the U.S. government viewed that song’s lyrics as a threat, rather than recognize what they were calling out. 

Acting as a middleman between Holiday and Anslinger is Jimmy Fletcher (Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes), a Black federal agent who played a hand in her initial arrest and prison sentence. From there, he’s repeatedly assigned to gain Holiday’s trust in order to locate any shred of narcotics-related evidence to use against her, since no white agent could ever get as close. However, while Fletcher was real, the romance they form in the film is based more on assumption than fact, mainly existing to underline his gradual realization that the government never saw him as one of its own but rather a tool to quash any possible racial reckoning in American culture. (The era’s bureaucratic disruption and propaganda techniques would go on to be replicated in everything from the 1970s COINTELPRO operations to anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric on Fox News.)

The problem with this setup is how confusing and convoluted the movie feels. Daniels’s story moves erratically between various postwar years without much indication of when certain events occur, only occasionally jumping back to its initial framing device: Billie’s interview with a nosy, flamboyant journalist played by Leslie Jordan. What we get is a hodgepodge of nightclub tours, brief court scenes, and interactions with various romantic partners, including Fletcher, Billie’s future husband Louis McKay (Rob Morgan), and an implied relationship with actress Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne). These moments are meant to parallel the government’s unyielding treatment of Holiday with the abusiveness of her male partners, but they often come across as slice-of-life interactions rather than as elaborations on the story.

Another issue, albeit one this movie had no control over, is how many movies in the past few months have tackled its themes better. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom dealt with racism in the 20th century American music industry, while MLK/FBI identified how eager the federal government was to undermine Martin Luther King Jr.’s credibility. Judah and the Black Messiah also provided a similar critique about law enforcement’s record of targeting black activists because their protests were viewed as a threat to white supremacy. Here, while the script tries to center on the ways in which “Strange Fruit” put a target on Holiday’s back, so much stuff happens per scene that there’s little room to analyze the song’s impact outside of its MacGuffin status. 

The one time we do hear the song play in its entirety happens during the film’s best moment: a drug-fueled nightmare scenario of Southern horrors that transitions into Holiday belting out her song on an empty stage. It, like most of the film’s better scenes, are effective thanks to Day’s performance of a woman who lost her innocence when young and yet perseveres in the face of life’s cruelties. Though victimized by everything from the patriarchy to heroin, Holiday keeps singing because she knows her voice has power, and is unwilling to let anyone prevent her from wielding it otherwise. 

Even with Day’s Golden Globe win for best actress under its belt, The United States vs. Billie Holiday as a biopic pales in comparison to the lead performance. Without a concise narrative direction, the film just feels like a series of events designed to generate outrage about the injustices Holiday endured, but little else. In that sense it suffers from a major biopic movie sin: not leaving much impression about an important person’s life.