That’s Me Amy

The very existence of Back to Black, the Amy Winehouse biopic currently playing to small audiences, is a curious one, since we already have the more or less definitive Amy Winehouse movie in Amy , a top-notch documentary that came out nearly a decade ago. That presented pretty much all we needed to know about Winehouse, a very talented torch-song singer who burned up the U.K. and won a bunch of Grammys in the U.S. and then died from alcohol poisoning in 2011 at age 27. But Back to Black felt like her story needed further dramatizing.

The movie purports to be the story behind the “making of the album that changed the world” or some such thing, that album being “Back to Black” itself, which Winehouse recorded after breaking up with her one true love, Blake. The problem is that we don’t see one second of her recording that album with Mark Ronson. Instead, she breaks up with Blake, gets into a cab, and then the song plays over a montage of Amy looking sad and occasionally singing the song. It’s pretty much the exact opposite problem that the recent Bob Marley biopic had, where all you see is Bob Marley recording the “Exodus” album, while all the interesting political activity in Jamaica moves to the side. It’s hagiographic about all the wrong things.

BACK TO BLACK  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Sam Taylor-Johnson
Written by: Matt Greenhalgh
Starring: Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Lesley Manville, Eddie Marsan
Running time: 122 mins

In Back to Black, the personal is political, but all you see of Amy Winehouse, musical genius, is a very early scene of her playing the guitar on her bed as a teenager. Other than that, she seems more interested in Blake, and vodka, than actually making music. But if you’ve watched one or more Amy Winehouse documentary, you know that’s not true.

That said, Back To Black is watchable, thanks largely to a  tremendously charismatic performance from Marisa Abela as Amy. She embodies Winehosue, and she does most of her own singing to excellent effect. She also has excellent chemistry with Jack O’Connell, who plays Blake, and is also quite good. The movies were created to watch sexy young people dance around and flirt with each other, and Back In Black seems to understand that. It takes its time with early scene where Amy and Blake meet cute in a pub, and it’s a pretty convincing display of lust at first sight.

Screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh handles that material efficiently. The music business stuff is very clichéd, but his delineation of Winehouse’s personal relationships is actually quite insightful. Though we skip over most of the Sid and Nancy-style debauchery that sends Amy to rehab and Blake to prison, there’s a nice scene toward the end where Blake breaks it off with her, saying his prison counselor has advised him that he suffers from “toxic codependency”. That’s certainly true, and it’s also nothing Sid Vicious would have said back in the 1960s.

The movie provides some interesting context for Winehouse’s addictive tendencies, too, indicating that her downward spiral comes less from her obsession with one man than from grief over the death of her beloved grandmother  and “style icon” (an affecting Lesley Manville), a former 1950s singer who passed away from cancer only a few years before Amy drank herself to death. As anyone who’s suffered grief knows, that’s a plausible explanation for self-destruction. As the movie, and all the other movies about Winehouse, shows, Amy was a nice middle=class Jewish girl who came from a large, loving supportive family. She wasn’t born in the gutter, and wasn’t bound for it, either.

Still, if Winehouse was such a musical genius, it would be nice to see some more actual music-making, even if we do get to hear plenty of music. The arguments with the record company and Winehouse’s battles with the paparazzi seem pretty warmed over. And the movie totally wastes Eddie Marson as as Winehouse’s father, who the documentaries portrayed as a manipulative Svengali but this movie seems to think was a portly old cab driver whose role in life is to shout, with joy, “that’s me Amy!” It’s a modestly melodramatic movie about a performer, who, despite her passionate fanbase, immense talent, and small but impressive body of work, was a minor note in music history. Back In Black is not the final word on Amy Winehouse, but it’s probably the last one we’re going to see.