The appeal of most pop music escapes me, but Amy Winehouse was an exception. She had a voice that could stop the world: a full-bodied, playful yet disciplined contralto that expressed deep, unvarnished, and sometimes darkly funny truths about love, pain, and self-doubt. The first time I heard her sing, I immediately recognized that she was not a pop icon sculpted in studios by producers, but an artist who shared her soul with the world. She was singular. I share this as necessary context for my conflicted feelings about Back to black (now streaming on Peacock, as well as VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), a biopic about the late singer from director Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey) – a biopic that arrives just as the genre has hit creative rock bottom, its form becoming cliché and its function being called into question. Marisa Abela plays Winehouse, an undeniably tragic figure whose robust creativity was offset by crippling addictions that killed her at age 27. Abela’s performance is terrific, but the rest of the film? It just doesn’t find it in that moment. At all.
BACK TO BLACKSTREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Amy (Abela) loves jazz. Love “Have you ever met a sane jazz fan?” her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan), jokes, and the sad irony of the statement is not lost on us. She sings at a family party and then goes home to indulge in the film’s first cliché: Struck by inspiration, she says a few lyrics out loud, scribbles them on paper, picks up a guitar, and creates a song over a handful of jazz chords. It springs from a place of joy. We see Amy on stage performing with such confidence, she owns the stage, the room, the building, the block, the zip code…and the world follows. Island Records beckons, and she’s barely 20 when her debut album, Frankestablishes her as a modest phenomenon in the UK. She’s not yet an international sensation, but her songs are on the jukeboxes in pubs, but her star is on the rise. Success only fuels her confidence, and when a group of managers and record label executives try to give her advice about her show, she responds with a reckless, defensive barrage of obscenities. You. Don’t. Push. Amy Winehouse. Around.
At the pub she meets Blake (Jack O’Connell) and we can smell the sordid trouble a mile away. They get on famously. He has an equally outsized personality and happens to be engaged, but Amy wants the same thing as Amy, so she takes it for herself. After their first night together, Blake smokes a line of cocaine on her make-up mirror to wake up in the morning and she blanches – she’s more of a weed-and-booze kind of girl. “I thought you were rock ‘n’ roll,” he says. “I’m not,” is her reply. “I’m jazz.” But who says jazz and rock can’t be potent bedfellows? The love between Amy and Blake burns bright. hotand before you know it, they’ve tattooed each other’s names on each other’s bodies. They go on a date to the zoo; they drink and drink and drink and one night on the sidewalk after Amy’s nightclub performance, they get into a fight. She swipes at his face and lands a hard right hook in his stomach. He wakes up the next morning at his grandmother Cynthia’s (Lesley Manville) house; no one loves Amy more than her beloved Nan, and there’s no one Amy loves as much as her Nan. She’s Amy’s safe place. Nan gently scolds her to take a shower; it reeks of alcohol and cigarettes. But that’s Amy’s scent, Amy jokes: “Chanel No. Pub.”
Blake has broken up with Amy after the incident, and she is despondent. Another meeting of managers and executives: Amy needs to go to rehab, they insist, but I think you know what their answer is, and Mitch backs her up; more on this moment in a minute. One day, during a walk in the park, Amy receives terrible news from Nan, who tells her she has terminal lung cancer. The heartbreak escalates. Nan stands Amy in front of the mirror and puts a beehive in her hair for the first time, then Amy says goodbye and ventures to New York to record her next album. She will never see Nan again. She copes by drinking more and more and smoking crack, something that may or may not be a factor in Blake returning to her embrace. And that album? It’s a hit. Paparazzi chase her and Blake as they stagger around in public, drinking, partying, fighting. Their life is a hurricane of exposure, humiliation, and exploitation. It is perhaps tragedy in its purest form.
What movies will it remind you of? Asif Kapadia’s 2015 Oscar-winning collage-documentary Amy It was a much more complete and less whitewashed portrait of a thorny personality. Back to black It’s not as forgettable as the bland Bob Marley biopic. One Lovefrom earlier this year; it’s also not as grossly sanitized and manipulative as the Freddie Mercury biography. Bohemian Rhapsody.
Performance worth watching: Abela is magnetic as Amy, and the fact that she sings herself and impressively emulates That Voice has little to do with it. Our sense that the real Winehouse was brusque and headlong is somewhat reaffirmed by Abela’s strident performance, but the actress also elicits significant empathy in embracing the character’s vulnerability. Abela plays Amy as an intensely fragile woman beneath that imposing, heavy beehive, and in the film’s best moments, we feel Amy’s joy and pain deeply.
Memorable dialogue: “You need to know this now,” Amy tells a pushy booking agent, “I’m not a fucking Spice Girl.”
Sex and skin: A couple of brief sex scenes; some fleeting nudity during a skinny-dipping sequence.
Our opinion: What kind of shit is this? Back to black The film oscillates between varnished homage and squeaky exploitation, two attitudes that stand in stark contrast to Abela’s performance, which celebrates Winehouse’s irrepressible talent and charisma even as it seems constrained by a script that wants to polish off its rough edges. The film was approved by Winehouse’s estate, overseen by her father, a troubled figure in her life who, by many accounts (including Kapadia’s documentary), supported her career as much as he benefited from her fame. The film recreates Winehouse’s performance of “Rehab” for the 2008 Grammy Awards, and when she sings “My daddy thinks I’m fine,” it cuts to a proud, clapping Mitch in the audience with utter sincerity and no sense of irony. Knowing Winehouse’s heartbreaking fate, shouldn’t that line be haunting, not joyful?
Taylor-Johnson struggles to present this story with any coherence. There are vivid moments here, when Blake and Amy first meet, with pheromones and electricity and a sense of destiny in the air, or when Amy performs drunk at a music festival, her careless eccentricity balanced by the hypnotic charm of her personality and her voice. And then there are lead-balloon moments where the film introduces artifice into the life story of a person who seemed to be anything but. but contrived: “Music is my rehabilitation,” she says when pressured into treatment; this, the film clumsily asserts, is how a hit song came about. And we shudder.
As someone who experiences deep emotions when listening to Winehouse’s music, I found myself searching the film – and within Abela’s performance – for something, a logical explanation for why this woman suffered so much. Maybe there is no such thing, but it also means I was primed and ready to pe deep into Amy’s story, yearning for understanding. There are moments when Abela practically takes control of the film, cultivating the love and appreciation we have for a deeply troubled person who lived what she sang and sang what she lived. There is truth in fleeting fragments of this film, and then there are swathes of abbreviated narrative rubbish that struggles to properly contextualise Winehouse’s fame and success, and too many unpleasant scenes in which the wasted Amy stumbles through the streets of London, red-eyed and slurred, as if she were courting disaster. One or two of these would have been enough.
Back to black In some ways, it blames Blake and the poisonous codependency of their relationship, but it doesn’t go any deeper than a weak assertion that two addicts in love are a destructive cocktail for both parties. It takes a look at Amy’s desire to be a mother, her chronic bulimia, and her struggles with self-harm. It shows little awareness of any underlying mental illness. It takes no interest in her complicated relationship with her parents, for obvious reasons. It makes us want to abolish the vile paparazzi hounds in Neptune, but it says nothing about media exploitation, an issue that has undergone a reckoning in recent years as the culture at large has rightfully worked to rehabilitate the reputations of former tabloid “hot messes” like Britney Spears and Monica Lewinsky. The only hot mess here is this movie, which ultimately has no idea what to do with its complicated subject matter.
Our calling: Abela’s noble work in portraying Amy Winehouse is wasted in the strangely messy and tacky film Back to blackI wanted to like it, but it pushed me from being a willing part to being an apologist and then a harsh critic. SKIP IT!
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
