The worst thing a biopic can do is use real-life video of the subject to demonstrate how realistic the acting was during the credits. None of this is covered in Back To Black; even the most uninformed viewer may watch the film in their own minds because the majority of us experienced Amy Winehouse’s ascent, renown, and fall.
Relative rookie Marisa Abela (BBC TV drama Industry) made a very brave and noble decision to accept what could be the most scrutinized performance of her life. And she’s amazing: Abela can sing, her voice is instantly recognizable as the vivacious and gobby Amy who spoke candidly in interviews, and the way her alcohol rattles in the chilly light of the corner store rings real. In a clip from the 2008 Glastonbury Festival, she exits the stage and totters toward the crowd while wearing high heels, practically defying the security personnel to allow her to collapse. It has a real, living, and dizzy feeling.
Unfortunately, though, a shoddy script that only adds to what we already know deflates her. The 2015 documentary Amy by Asif Kapadia featured a wealth of archive material in addition to the few details about her life that she chose to keep private from the media. The family provided a refutation of their portrayal in the BBC documentary Reclaiming Amy in 2021 (Mitch, Amy’s father, stated he suffered a nervous collapse following Amy’s release). This movie tries to give us the same tale from Amy’s point of view, but it falls short at the most crucial point: what did Amy find appealing about the man who would become her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), that the rest of us didn’t? He is not who he was in the headlines and is not here.
The songs serve as a musical-style account of her life, but there isn’t any time spent demonstrating the songwriting process.
In other places, certain aspects of her life have been glossed over, while her father—played by Eddie Marsan—is presented as the unquestionable hero thanks to selectively chosen facts. Her closest friends, who were actually so close that one of them chose the Dolce & Gabbana dress with the leopard print she wore for her funeral, are only passing references in a story that mostly focuses on Blake.
The idea behind the movie could be problematic; Fielder-Civil was the focus of this second and last album, and the storyline for the movie takes its cues from her lyrics in Back to Black. Although the songs tell her life story in a manner reminiscent of a musical, there isn’t any time spent demonstrating the creative process (pouring them out fully-formed in her bedroom with an acoustic guitar doesn’t count). We don’t witness the creative choices she made in the recording studio that made her a household name, or the nuanced yet potent singer-songwriter who took home five Grammy Awards in one evening. Amy Winehouse is merely a girl singing about a boy in Back To Black.