The Amy Winehouse Movie Doesn’t Like Amy Winehouse Very Much

Photo: Dean Rogers/Focus Features

Amy Winehouse won five awards at the 2008 Grammys, including Record of the Year, though she wasn’t able to be there in person. Denied a visa due to her drug abuse, she performed instead via satellite from London. We get a glimpse of that night inside Riverside Studios during Asif Kapadia’s extraordinary 2015 documentary Amy, where Amy gazes up in awe at the sight of Tony Bennett, one of her idols, joining Natalie Cole onstage in Los Angeles. She looks more like a fan than an exiled member of that glittery world, winking at the audience up late with her and making a snarky aside about Justin Timberlake as the nominees are announced. But when she wins and the room erupts around her, it’s as though she’s been cracked wide open — she’s stunned, frozen in place, her face vulnerable and so very young.

That triumph came during a rare period of stability for the famously troubled artist, whose label had made her sign a contract agreeing to enter treatment and get clean, so it’s no surprise that the new film Back to Black uses it as an upbeat place to land. Only, when Amy wins her big prize in director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film, we don’t cut to star Marisa Abela’s face re-creating that expression. Instead, we get a close-up of a beaming Eddie Marsan, in the part of Amy’s father Mitch Winehouse, in the crowd. Every musical biopic is the product of conflicting versions of the past filtered through different creative agendas. Why this particular one is so intent on absolving all the men in its subject’s life is a mystery for the ages. Amy Winehouse may have released only two albums before her death at the age of 27, but she lived large enough to provide material for several movies — one of them being the aforementioned Amy, which was woven together from archival footage and interviews with dozens of people who knew Winehouse.

Back to Black is less completist, but not because it has a particular focus in mind. It’s not especially interested in Amy’s music, with her songwriting process represented by a few scattered scenes of her scrawling in a notebook, and her time in the studio also skimmed only in passing. Nor does it care about how that music impacted people, in that Amy’s rise is depicted mainly by way of the crowd of paparazzi who start hovering outside her home like vultures hoping to pick at her bones. It can be hard for a biopic to re-create the outsize presence of a major performing artist, but Back to Black sets out to do the opposite — not to shrink its subject down to human scale, but to leave her diminished. It’s a film about Amy Winehouse that just doesn’t care for Amy Winehouse much, as an artist or as a person. It’s tempting to lay the blame for this on Abela, who’s at her weakest when called upon for vocals, thanks to a studied singing face that’s hard to watch and a tendency to lean so hard into Winehouse’s inflections that it crosses into caricature. But the reason the Industry actor’s performance feels so centerless otherwise is that neither Taylor-Johnson’s direction nor writer Matt Greenhalgh’s egregious script offer much sense of what’s going on in inside their subject.

Taylor-Johnson frames Amy’s rebelliousness and romanticization of the past as juvenile — she borrows her beloved grandmother’s (Lesley Manville) keepsake box and, right away, almost loses it. When she storms out of her label’s office despite her dad’s attempts to reason with her, declaring that she’s going to take time off because she needs to live to write songs, she isn’t an artist who knows what she needs but a teenager throwing a strop. Greenhalgh decides that the problem with Amy all along was that she wanted but wasn’t able to become a mother, a simplistic fixation that turns up late in the film, becomes all-consuming, and is implied, unforgivably, to be what triggers the binge that kills her. Meanwhile, the restlessness that drives her toward all that alcohol and drug abuse, and whatever pleasure she might at some point have found in those substances, goes underexplored, with the film preferring to skip to the tottering, runny-eyelinered end of a session. Its Amy is all need and desperation.

The rest of the movie is filled in by the men in Amy’s life, who seem to get increased screen time based on how villainized they were while she was alive. Producer Salaam Remi and manager Raye Cosbert, who took over after Winehouse parted ways with her original rep Nick Shymansky, are barely presences onscreen, and Mark Ronson is only a name mentioned in a meeting. But Blake Fielder-Civil, the ex-husband who confessed to introducing Winehouse to crack and heroin as well as self-harm, gets what amounts to a full-throated defense. The film makes a point of showing Amy venturing into hard-drug use on her own, while Blake, played by Jack O’Connell with slippery, skipped-a-few-showers charisma, is portrayed more as a recipient of toxic behavior than a joint participant in it. Any suggestion that he had mercenary reasons to stick by her is countered by a scene in which he breaks things off with her while in prison, telling her, “I need a fresh start — some fucking normality!” Mitch, who once showed up to visit his distressed daughter with a camera crew in tow to shoot his own TV special, is shown to be very present in Amy’s life while also being utterly oblivious to the severity of her substance abuse, a curious combination meant to soften the fact that he infamously told his daughter she didn’t need rehab. When Amy performs “Rehab” at the Grammys, Mitch and the rest of his table cheer in recognition at the line referencing this incident, as if to enforce that this wasn’t actually a regrettable mistake.

I don’t think accuracy, if it’s even possible, matters much for the majority of the audiences who’ve made these sorts of biopics into big business. What’s on offer is the familiar, from the actor mimicking a music icon’s famous mannerisms to the unveiling of how a hit song is staged. To become a star is to have some version of yourself living in the imaginations of millions of people, and to watch a rendition of a star’s life is to compare the person onscreen to the one in your head, neither of which is the real thing. But Back to Black made me tremendously sad for reasons that had nothing to do with the untimely death that it leaves off-screen. Amy Winehouse was brassy and brilliant, with a torch singer’s soul and a hilariously foul mouth, and her relationships with these men, whom she loved and defended, were complicated. There’s also no denying that Winehouse was surrounded by people who prioritized her celebrity and earning power over her personal well-being, a dynamic that everyone who was watching along at the time was privy to because the media was doing the same thing.

Her story doesn’t need a villain to be a tragedy, but it also doesn’t need to hoist her up as her own worst enemy, someone who was doomed from the start and couldn’t be helped. That’s not a kind or empathetic way to think about addiction, though it is a convenient one for this movie.