HBO film explores the life and legacy of blues icon Bessie Smith

It's taken 22 years, but the life story of an American blues icon finally comes to the small screen in “Bessie,” premiering Saturday, May 16, on HBO.

Queen Latifah, also an executive producer on the film, tackles the title role of Bessie Smith, who rose from childhood poverty to become one of the most successful recording artists of the 1920s. As her fame grew, Smith used the music of the blues to give voice to a social and ethnic class who otherwise had little to no political visibility.

Director Dee Rees, who also co-wrote the TV movie screenplay after writers such as Horton Foote had struggled with it, says she didn't want “Bessie” to be a conventional musical with slick production numbers drawn from Smith's biggest hits.

“I didn't want it to be a glitzy, ‘jazz hands' biopic,” Rees says, “and I didn't want to rely on other people's accounts of her. I wanted to find Bessie's own take on things, so I started with her songs, especially the ones that she wrote. I thought that would be a good window into her psyche. I wanted to get behind her eyes. What is beautiful from afar often is very painful up close. I wanted to show that Bessie's bravado, this strength that people saw from afar, actually covered a very vulnerable, lonely woman.”

It was that vulnerability that gave Latifah her first point of connection with this role. “She had an aching desire to be loved, and she was willing to do things that were not the best decisions just to create that love,” the actress says. “She needed to have her whole family around her, so she basically footed the bill for all of them, just to have them there — even if they didn't all get along. She needed to have protection, to feel safe, so that's why she dealt with (husband) Jack, even though she knew the things he was up to. She couldn't say ‘I love you,' though. She definitely had some blocks, but the idea of coming home to an empty house was something that she was afraid of.”

Unable to fully give or receive love, Smith turned to multiple relationships ranging from her marriage to Jack (Michael Kenneth Williams, “Boardwalk Empire”), to liaisons with female lover Lucille (Tika Sumpter) and charismatic bootlegger Richard (Mike Epps).

“Every person gave her something different, something that she needed,” Latifah explains. “Each of them served a purpose and they weren't really interchangeable. I can relate to that on a lot of different levels.”

“I hope (viewers) take away the realization that blues was a form of social protest, and there was this kind of radical black feminism that existed with these women, from Ma Rainey to Bessie Smith to Billie Holiday,” Rees says. “These women are part of a continuum that has shaped entertainment today. They were going against the flow. That's why we're still talking about them today.”