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It's Andra Day Season

Thirty minutes into her debut live-action film, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, singer Andra Day bares all. The scene is nestled after Billie Holiday, played by Day, is ripped from the stage by law enforcement for attempting to sing her monumental work, the then-controversial “Strange Fruit.” To deal with the pain, as Holiday often did during the second half of her life, she reaches for heroin, turning to her friend, drug provider, and fellow addict Joe Guy for respite.

Here, as elsewhere in the film, Day plays it full tilt: Her curled hair unfurling, a thin film of sweat resting on her brow. She stumbles around the apartment wearing only a longline bra and girdle of peachy silk. She slips on Joe’s coat and heads out for ice cream, her silver heels clicking against the hardwood floors, but when she opens the door, she’s faced with the might of the federal government in the form of a narcotics task force, headed by an agent who had been posing as a starstruck soldier, Jimmy Fletcher (played by Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes). “You wanna search me?” she spits before undressing completely, viciously throwing her clothes to the floor. She stretches out her arms, and the camera takes her in from the waist upward. It’s a moment primed not on sex appeal but on baring her internal contradictions and refusal to be easily controlled, which is what this role required of Day to pull it off.