The first thing you probably need to know about “The United States vs. Billie Holiday”—other than it’s a film by filmmaker Lee Daniels, his first feature since 2013’s “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”—is that it was originally a Paramount Pictures film scheduled for this February and hoping to be the studio’s one and only Oscar player this season. That plan got scrapped, and Paramount, like so many studios, decided to sell the film off to Hulu, for an upcoming February release.
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Does that mean, Paramount didn’t have faith in its Oscar chances? Maybe, but Hulu certainly does, as the film just got dated for inside Oscar qualification boundaries: February 26, 2021.
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Based on the book “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs”—which obviously doesn’t sound like it has to do much with Billie Holiday on the surface— the film actually intersects with many ideas in the war on drugs portrait, first and foremost the United States’ prohibition of drugs (specifically, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act passed in 1914) and how in their bigoted attack, they targeted jazz musicians like Billie Holiday, a long-time heroin addict.
The film follows Holiday as the Federal Department of Narcotics targets her with an undercover sting operation led by black Federal Agent Jimmy Fletcher, with whom she had a tumultuous affair.
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Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day (making her feature debut) plays Billie Holiday, Trevante Rhodes (“Moonlight”) plays Fletcher, and the cast also includes Garrett Hedlund, Natasha Lyonne, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Evan Ross, Erik LaRay Harvey, Dana Gourrier, and more.
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Day may be a newb to big-screen acting, but Lee Daniels wasn’t concerned. “She wasn’t acting,” he said in a recent Vanity Fair profile about her audition. “She was just baring her soul.”
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The United States vs. Billie Holiday” arrives via Hulu on February 26, 2021. Watch the first trailer below.