This movie focuses on a lot that went wrong with Billie Holiday's life and career. It reveals once again the corrosive power of government to inappropriately interfere in the lives of private citizens it doesn't care for, many of them talented people of color. J.Edgar Hoover had a deep seated hatred of so many different kinds of people, many of them black, and he made it his mission to squash them, all while ignoring the boundaries of the law. Unfortunately when that is the focus, the message ends up being about the destructive power of drugs in general and opiates specifically. That part of the story seems quite modern because we are seeing it all over again, but this time it is largely white people who are convinced that they are not addicts, they have pain that needs to be treated and first opiates and then heroin is the cure, when what it is is an alternate universe that you are transported to briefly, but upon your return to reality things are as bad if not worse than when you left. It is a miserable cycle that the movie, and Billie Holiday herself fell into, and never got out of.
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