Bessie
(HBO)
In her eloquent 2011 debut feature Pariah, director Dee Rees explored the complicated paths of love, identity and personal freedom for a young African-American Brooklyn lesbian. That same intimate focus is beamed onto a much bigger canvas in her unvarnished but admiring portrait of influential blues singer Bessie Smith, who overcame discrimination and an abusive childhood to achieve enormous popularity in the 1920s and ’30s. Playing the “Empress of the Blues” has been a passion project for Queen Latifah since early in her acting career, and that commitment informs a raw, gutsy performance that embraces the fierce contradictions of this combative, charismatic woman. The movie, unsurprisingly, is rich in entertaining musical interludes, spanning Smith’s rise on the black vaudeville circuit, her rousing theater and tentshow performances, and the…
