Directed by Lee Daniels and written by the Pulitzer Prize Suzan-Lori Park, The United States vs Billie Holiday is a 2022 film that traces the rise, fall, and relations with the US government of jazz singer and blues Billie Holiday, a true legend of music and antiracist engagement, born in 1915 and died in 1959. It is the film adaptation of the 2015 book Chasing the Scream written by Johann Hari.
Thanks to Billie Holiday’s interpretation, singer Andra Day won the Golden Globe as Best Protagonist Actress in a dramatic film. The film will be on Rai 5 Monday, June 8, 2026, was produced by Lee Daniels Entertainment, New Slate Ventures, Roth/Kirschenbaum Films and is distributed in Italy by BiM distribution.
La trama di Gli Stati Uniti contro Billie Holiday
In the 1940s, Billie Holiday was an icon. Her sparkling clothes, her songs and her presence on stage had made her a diva. One thing, however, did not go right down to the US federal government: its predilection and cocciutaggine in singing on all the most influential poles of North America (and even after being more times warmly encouraged not to do so) Strage fruit, ballad of complaint against the lynching of black people.
Under the pretext of his abuse of heavy drugs he will start a real war against the singer, who had had an incredibly difficult life. Found in the eye of the cyclone, between war against drugs and civil battles, without knowing who can trust but without ever giving up his true and only passion, music, Holiday will inherit a series of increasingly desperate and wrong choices, which will take her on a hospital bed, in New York. Neither will the government leave her alone on this occasion.
Un biopic che fa di più (o quasi)
Musical biopics are so: safe, well formulated, deeply narrative. They all begin more or less in the same way, with the initial difficulties of the artist in question, his climbing to success, his problems, his collaborators, some smarter and crooked of others, his troubled loves, the apex of success, problems, joys, loves, abuses, injustices and then the end and legend. Here and there, some musical intermezzo, to like. After all always a musical biopic is it.
The United States versus Billie Holiday follows this pattern very well, but can be much more than a musical biopic at the same time. It is a tragic and wonderful story, well told, that does not exceed in rhetoric (if not in a couple of central parts, that we are ready to forgive) and you do not save in the vehicular an important message: racism was a problem and it is still. Probably, it will still be for a while. Every day, black women are abandoned to a destiny of suffering, abuse of substances and discrimination. The war on drugs was nothing but a way for the federal government to imprison and silence as many black people as possible, in an extremely delicate period in which an explicit attack on minorities would risk a social uprising but integration was still far away.
Billie Holiday, with her deep talent and her confused and painful life, is just an example of all this. To close the whole in the best possible way the gigantic actors’ tests by Andra Day and Trevante Rhodes, which give thickness to a well-reported story, which manages to make infuriated and tighten the teeth, but which unfortunately does not stop being a musical biopic even for a second, while expanding the genre.
La locandina
BiM
Il cast
Andra Day è Billie Holiday
Trevante Rhodes è Jimmy Fletcher
Garrett Hedlund è Harry Anslinger
Natasha Lyonne è Tallulah Bankhead
Da’Vine Joy Randolph è Roslyn
Tyler James Williams è Lester “Prez” Young
Rob Morgan è McKay
Dana Gourrier è Sadie
Evan Ross è agente Sam Williams
Dove in streaming Gli Stati Uniti contro Billie Holiday
In addition to live streaming on RaiPlay, the film is for hire and or purchase on CHILI, Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, Rakuten TV.
L’articolo The United States against Billie Holiday, the musical biopic with an extra march – Review of the movie tonight on TV proviene da Dituttounpop.it.
