There is so much fact-fudging going on in The United States vs. Billie Holiday that for all the good it did screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, she could just as easily have fabricated a character out of whole cloth based on the life of a famous jazz-singer whose heroin addiction paved the way to an early grave. But that would have denied director Lee Daniels (Precious, The Paperboy) the privilege of reacquainting, and in many cases introducing, the world to “Strange Fruit,” Holiday’s bitterly haunting signature song, which forms the heart of the piece. It might also have robbed viewers of the preternatural beauty on display in Andra Day's electrifying transformation. The Grammy-winning singer and San Diego native (her family relocated to SoCal when Day was three) is making her acting debut as the First Lady of the Blues.From the outside, the band of oddball adjutants that answer to Holiday’s beck have what it takes to make it in the cast of cast-off characters living inside the best of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Dolemite is My Name). Leslie Jordan opens the show with a dollop of good ol’ Southern boy sleaze as Reginald Lord Devine, a wigged out radio host who is equal parts Rip Taylor and televangelist Ernest Angley, topped by a Karastan pile of curls. Dolemite alum Da’Vine Joy Randolph appears as Holiday’s one-eyed aide de camp/traveling companion Roslyn, Tyler James Williams plays Lester Young, the pork pie-hatted Jazz messiah credited with hatching the “Lady Day” handle, and Natasha Lyonne shows up as Tallulah Bankhead. Together they go nowhere, despite being all dressed up.Other than a stock troupe of white faces in high places — Garrett Hedlund’s depiction of Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger borders on cartoon overstatement — Holiday’s worst enemies were her own people. The plot flutters forward with the chaotic rapidity of a VU meter that peaks in the red every time Trevante Rhodes appears. The most disputed member of her inner-circle is Jimmy Fletcher (Rhodes). According to Slate, “Very little is documented of Fletcher’s life,” leaving the filmmakers ample room to sketch with a free hand. Fresh from the service, Fletcher shows up in full uniform to catch Holiday’s show at Cafe Society. Even his mother is outraged to learn that Jimmy is a Fed working on the side of whitey to take down a prominent African-American. A romance with the married Holiday is as inevitable as it is unverified: Fletcher was in fact ordered to follow Holiday’s tour, but there’s no record of him boarding the bus. And how preposterous is it to have Fletcher — an officer who, according to the script, wanted nothing more than to keep drugs out of the black community — turn a blind eye to Candyman dropping off a vial of Holiday’s “medicine”? The only thing more outrageous is Fletcher’s sudden desire to ride the horse with Holiday. Rico and Youngblood would be more likely to share a needle with The Untouchables’ Eliot Ness. “All of Me” was to Holiday what “Over the Rainbow” was to Judy Garland. As grateful as she was for the attention it brought, Holiday and her audience wanted “Strange Fruit” to be a regular in her nightclub act. The more “people in high places” who cautioned her to drop the number the more important it was that it be included. Her connection to the song gives the film its bite, even when the cogs of the plot prove to be toothless. (2021) — Scott Marks