Billie: Doc on Jazz Great Billie Holiday Elevated by Newly Unearthed Audio Archive
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
The new documentary Billie is for music nerds what hieroglyphics on a cave wall are for anthropologists: not so much a revelation as clear confirmation of a more nuanced life than previously known. It also has one heck of a back story.
“In the early hours of February 6, 1978, the body of a young journalist was discovered on a street in Washington D.C. Her name was Linda Lipnack Kuehl,” the film’s opening credits inform us. “For the past decade [Linda] had devoted her life to uncovering the true story of legendary singer Billie Holiday.
“Recording hundreds of hours of interviews with those who knew her best, the book was never finished, and these tapes not heard...until now.” Which is where Billie writer/director James Erskine steps in, to impressive effect.
Using Lipnack Kuehl’s previously unheard interviews as a kind of aural roadmap — and there was 200 hours gathered in all — Erskine walks us through Holiday’s rollercoaster life which is at once familiar and, thanks to insights from “friends, family members, band members, peers from 1930s Harlem, piano players, psychiatrists and a pimp,” now much more vivid.
Crucially, Erskine ensures Holiday’s own voice (and, somewhat eerily, Lipnack Kuehl’s as well) is included. And while the Holiday clips weren’t actually recorded by Lipnack Kuehl, the narrative is nevertheless enriched and contextualized.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
The film is also colourized, presumably to make the performances feel more vibrant, and while that may be off-putting to purists faithful to the original footage, it distinguishes Billie in yet another way from the many previous explorations of Holiday’s life.
Low points are glumly if necessarily revisited: Holiday’s chaotic childhood, her off-again, on-again sex work which began in her youth, drug and alcohol problems, turbulent romantic relationships and the evil, racist persecution by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics which literally followed her to her death bed at New York's Metropolitan Hospital in 1959.
The high-water marks, too, are explored though as always, it is Holiday’s exquisite, almost otherworldly voice — silenced for good at age 44 after years of non-stop substance abuse — that spellbinds most.
An examination of the impact of the song “Strange Fruit,” an unambiguous and unblinking comment on lynching, puts into sharp perspective the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has been urgently unfolding for generations despite only latent mainstream acceptance.
As with most documentaries of this sort, interviews propel the narrative; in this case, that includes the famous (Artie Shaw, Dick Cavett, Tony Bennett) and the infamous, including the beforementioned psychiatrists and pimp.
One wonders if journalist Lipnack Kuehl’s book, had it been written, would have captured this story with the verve of Erskine’s film, which leverages still images, archival footage, and of course those crackly audio cassettes, to marvellous and chilling effect.
Billie. Directed by James Erskine. With Billie Holiday, Linda Lipnak Kuehl, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Sylvia Syms and Charles Mingus. Opens in select theaters and is available on TVOD December 4.