A gripping portrait: Billie reviewed

This documentary about Billie Holiday is transfixing. Not just because it’s about Billie Holiday — I am not into jazz yet her version of ‘Strange Fruit’ is obviously incredible — but for the previously unheard audio tapes recorded by Linda Lipnack Kuehl in the 1970s with the people who knew her. This includes, for instance, Billie’s cousin, John Fagan, who chucklingly says he pimped her out as a child — ‘girls started young’ — and that women who ‘step out of line’ like to be knocked about and are proud of having a black eye as it shows ‘someone loves them’. Or it’s a band member recalling how Billie had to enter through the kitchens at venues and had to ‘black up’ when playing with Count Basie’s band because she was fair and a white woman couldn’t be seen singing with non-whites. You do have to wonder if Billie, who died ravaged by drink and drugs at just 44, were to magically come back today, then she would complain that the world was now too ‘woke’. I’m thinking not, but other views are very available in this magazine.

Written and directed by James Erskine, the film is not only about Billie but Linda too. She was a high school teacher and fan who, her sister tells us, ‘wanted Billie to have the voice Billie never had’. She intended to write a book but ‘couldn’t get that voice down on paper’. Linda died in peculiar circumstances (more later), but lives on wonderfully here as a funny, smart, empathetic interviewer. As archive footage plays, and we hit the Doomed Singer milestones that we know, alas, we’ll have to hit — the early success, the heroin, the exploitation, the fall from grace, the tragic death; see also: Judy, Whitney, Amy — we hear Linda throughout, along with all her interviewees.