Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-
Music: A-

There’s a moment in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, maybe two thirds of the way through, in which the camera closes in on the face of star Andra Day, playing the title character, singing her signature song “Strange Fruit.” We see her perform the entire song—three haunting verses about the lynching of Black people in 1930s America—while she never breaks eye contact with us, the viewers. The scene has an unforgettably confrontational power to it, much as Billie Holiday herself had in the era, as she insisted on singing the song live in spite of government pressure not to do so.

If only the rest of the movie had that kind of power. This latest offering by director Lee Daniels is a little too preoccupied with sporadic artistic flourishes that make little sense, editing meant to resemble really old stock footage at distractingly inconsistent moments, and cinematography that briefly slips into black and white for only a few seconds at a time. Almost as if it’s a trick to fit more into the film’s already-long 130 minutes, in the second half we get several montage sequences that seem only to serve as narrative shortcuts.

A biopic is always better when it focuses on one specific time or one specific element of a person’s life—this was precisely what kept Lee Daniels’s 2013 film The Butler from quite achieving greatness. The United States vs. Billie Holiday, however, attempts to have it both ways, narrowing focus on that song “Strange Fruit,” but still covering her life through two different decades.

The end result is something that lacks focus or narrative cohesion, with Daniels’s gaze into Holiday’s life often turning away from the specificity of that song. The U.S. government is obsessed with silencing her by any means necessary—a frequent theme in films of the past year or so, reflecting an unfortunately frequent theme of the U.S. government for decades—and they often use Holiday’s heroine addiction against her. In some cases they literally framed her, couching their actions in the “war on drugs,” illustrating how very old that naive and misguided notion really is. This might have made a better film if it were more explicitly about that exploitation, but instead it’s a film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be about. All of these things are worthy of attention in film, but they also need a dramatic center.

If anything makes The United States vs. Billie Holiday worth the time, though, it’s Andra Day, in her first starring role, in which she also songs a bunch of Billie Holiday songs incredibly well. The film would be truly dull affair without her in it, as she’s the only character given much in the way of nuance, all the other parts being too small to allow for performance to rise above Suzan Lori-Parks’s relatively aimless script. Holiday moves from one relationship with an abusive man to another, the most complicated being that with FBI agent Jimmy Fletcher (Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes), the one you could argue was the least directly abusive but still doesn’t treat her right.

Fletcher, as it happens, is one of multiple supporting characters who are fictionalized. There’s nothing inherently bad about that, as it depends on how it’s done. For instance, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is also given a loose structure that barely holds together, wherein the story is told in flashback from a radio interview Holiday is giving to “Reginald Lord Devine,” also fictional, played by Leslie Jordan with a wig of curly white hair with so much body that at first I thought the character was supposed to be an old lady. The movie only returns to this interview so infrequently that you nearly forget that’s where we started, and it leaves you wondering why they bothered with the conceit at all.

The great Natasha Lyonne also appears as Tallulah Bankhead, with whom Holiday was romantically involved. Lyonne is only in a few scenes, and although I would not suggest that more white people need to be included in a Black person’s story, it seems odd to cast Lyonne in this part if her talents are just going to be underused. Someone else needs to give Natasha Lyonne better roles, in other movies. If nothing else, Daniels could have delved deeper into Holiday’s open bisexuality, as it exists here exclusively as yet another thing for the government to attempt using against her.

That said, The United States vs. Billie Holiday had every chance to be better, and it just overall slightly misses the mark. It tells a story that is too broad when so much of Billie Holiday’s story requires pointed focus, but at least it has a memorable performance at its center. Here’s hoping this jump starts Andra Day’s career, and she gets starring roles in better movies herself.

*Just hearing her sing is the best thing.*

Overall: B-