Other figures such as Pigmeat Markham and dancer Detroit Red recount the open drug-taking of the era. Markham explains how smoking reefer was so commonplace when Holiday performed at the Apollo that she came out to a cloud of smoke thick enough for a contact high. The risqué atmosphere, with its coterie of pimps, built an environment where her drug habit and supply of brutal men was inexhaustible. In a different era, with greater understanding, she might have found help. Then again, one can’t forget the recency of Amy Whinehouse either. And as with the documentary “Amy,” we feel helpless during "Billie" as her immense talent withers away. Erskine subtly juxtaposes the clarity in Holiday’s swooning vocals, heard in the colorized performances, against the sound of her later throaty slurring interviews. The audio foreshadows Holiday’s later visual decline caused by the ravages of booze, weed, opium, cocaine, and heroin.
Much of “Billie” is composed as one long performance by Lady Day. Her songs not only comprise the documentary’s formidable soundtrack, their autobiographical qualities are like lines of monologue from the singer herself. Lady Day’s performance of “Don’t Explain,” for example, sees her bone-thin, barely recognizable, and intimates the immense desolation in her personal life. “Fine and Mellow,” where she seductively interplays with her close friend, saxophonist Lester Young, relates her sibling-like affection for Young as opposed to her attraction toward terrible men.
“Billie” is steeped in that kind of melancholy. Not just in matters of the heart, but political and racial, too. The Federal Government’s narcotics bureau stalked the singer for over a decade and employed people in her inner-circle as informants. Kuehl’s guiding questions, heard in her recorded interviews, ask whether the government’s targeting of Holiday sprung from her celebrity: She would make a name-making trophy for any agent who captured her. Kuehl also wonders how much Holiday’s political stances, heard in songs like “Strange Fruit,” which unflinchingly compares horrific lynchings to dead delectables, informed the government’s dogged pursuit. Showing tremendous foresight, Kuehl explores how white men like Holiday’s producer John Hammond, her agent Joe Glaser, and bandleader Artie Shaw posed as allies only to betray her. These hurdles, which Erskine smartly connects, are emblematic of the traps other black entertainers faced (see Joe Louis and Ray Charles) and to a point, with regards to fake allyship, they still face.
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