Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Back to Black’ on VOD, a Messy Amy Winehouse Biopic That’ll Have You Screaming “No, No, No”

The appeal of most pop music eludes me, but Amy Winehouse was an exception. She had a voice that could stop the world from turning – a full-bodied contralto that was playful but disciplined, expressing deep, unvarnished, sometimes darkly funny truths about love, pain and self-doubt. The first time I heard her sing, I recognized immediately that she wasn’t a pop icon sculpted in studios by producers, but an artist sharing 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 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 bottomed out creatively, its form cliched and its function in question. Marisa Abela plays Winehouse, an inarguably tragic figure whose robust creativity was countered by crippling addictions that killed her at age 27. Abela’s performance is tremendous, but the rest of the film? It doesn’t meet her in the moment. Not at all.

BACK TO BLACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Amy (Abela) loves jazz. Loves it. “Y’ever met a sane jazz fan?” jokes her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan), and the bleak irony of the statement isn’t lost on us. She sings at a family party, and later goes home to indulge the movie’s first cliche: Struck by inspiration, she speaks a few  lyrics out loud, scribbles them on paper, grabs a guitar and births a song over a handful of jazz chords. It comes 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 postal code – and the world comes next. Island Records comes calling, and she’s barely 20 years old when her debut album, Frank, establishes her as a modest phenom in the U.K. She isn’t an international sensation yet, but her songs are in jukeboxes at the pub, but her star is rising. Success only feeds her confidence, and when a group of managers and label execs try to give her advice about her stage show, she replies with a rash, defensive barrage of obscenities. You. Do not. Push. Amy Winehouse. Around.

The pub is where she meets Blake (Jack O’Connell), and we can smell the sleazy trouble from miles out. They hit it off smashingly. He’s a similarly outsized personality who happens to be taken, but Amy wants what Amy wants, so she takes him for herself. After their first night together, Blake chops a line of coke on her makeup mirror for his morning wake-me-up bump, and she blanches – she’s more of a weed-and-liquor 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? Amy and Blake’s love burns hot hot hot, and before you know it, they’ve tattooed each other’s names on their bodies. They have a date to the zoo; they drink and drink and drink and one night on the sidewalk after a saucy-boozy Amy nightclub performance, they quarrel. She claws him in the face and lands a solid right to his gut. She wakes the next morning at her grandmother Cynthia’s (Lesley Manville) house; no one loves Amy more than her beloved Nan, and there’s no one Amy loves like her Nan. She’s Amy’s safe place. Nan gently chides her to shower – she reeks of booze and cigarettes. But that’s Amy’s scent, Amy jokes, “Chanel No. Pub.”

Blake is through with Amy after the incident, and she’s crestfallen. Another managers-and-execs meeting: Amy needs to go to rehab, they insist, but I think you know what her answer is, and Mitch backs her up – more on this moment in a minute. One day during a stroll in the park, Amy gets terrible news from Nan, who drops that she has terminal lung cancer. The heartbreak compounds. Nan parks Amy in front of the mirror and beehives her hair for the first time, then Amy says goodbye as she ventures to New York to record her next album. She’ll 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. As for that album? It’s a smash. The paparazzi chase her and Blake as they stumble around in public, drinking, partying, scrapping. Her life is a hurricane of exposure, humiliation, exploitation. It’s tragedy in perhaps its purest form.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning 2015 collage-documentary Amy was a far more complete, less whitewashed portrait of a thorny personality. Back to Black isn’t as forgettable as the bland Bob Marley biopic One Love, from earlier this year; neither is it as grossly sanitized and manipulative as Freddie Mercury bio Bohemian Rhapsody.

Performance Worth Watching: Abela is magnetic as Amy, and the fact that she does all her own singing and impressively emulates That Voice has little to do with it. Our sense that the real Winehouse was abrasive and rash is somewhat affirmed by Abela’s brassy performance, but the actress also stirs significant empathy by embracing the character’s vulnerability. Abela renders Amy an intensely fragile woman beneath that towering, top-heavy beehive, and in the film’s best moments, we very much feel Amy’s joy and pain.

Memorable Dialogue: “You need to know this now,” Amy tells a pushy booking agent, “I ain’t no fuckin’ Spice Girl.”

Sex and Skin: A couple of brief sex scenes; some fleeting nudity during a skinny-dipping sequence.

Our Take: What kind of fuckery is this? Back to Black veers wildly between varnished tribute and icky exploitation, both of which are at great odds with Abela’s performance, which celebrates Winehouse’s irrepressible talent and charisma, even when it feels restricted by a screenplay that wants to sand down her rougher edges. The film was sanctioned by Winehouse’s estate, overseen by her father, a problematic figure in her life who by many accounts – including Kapadia’s documentary – supported her career as much as he coattail-profited on 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, cheering Mitch in the audience with absolute earnestness, and no sense of irony. Knowing Winehouse’s gut-wrenching fate, shouldn’t that line be haunting, not joyous? 

Taylor-Johnson struggles to present this story with any consistency. 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 drunkenly performs at a music festival, her sloppy eccentricity balanced by the mesmerizing allure of her persona and voice. And then there are lead-balloon moments where the film jams contrivances into the life story of a person who seemed to be anything but contrived: “Music is my rehab,” she asserts when being pushed to get treatment – this, the movie asserts ham-handedly, is How A Hit Song Came To Be. And we cringe. 

As someone who experiences profound emotions when listening to Winehouse’s music, I found myself searching in the movie, and within Abela’s performance, for something, a logical explanation for why this woman suffered so much. Perhaps there’s no such thing, but it also means I was primed and ready to be deeply engrossed in Amy’s story, yearning for insight. There are times when Abela all but takes control of the movie, cultivating the love and appreciation we have for a deeply troubled person who lived what she sang and sang what she lived. There’s truth in fleeting bits of this movie – and then there are swaths of shorthand-narrative slop that struggles to properly contextualize Winehouse’s fame and success, and far too many distasteful scenes in which Wasted Amy stumbles through the streets of London, bleary-eyed and slurring, as if courting disaster. One or two of those would have been plenty.

Back to Black kind of blames Blake and the poisonous codependency of their relationship, but doesn’t probe any deeper than a thin assertion that two addicts in love are a destructive cocktail for both parties. It gives about half a glance to 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’s disinterested in her complicated relationship with her parents, for obvious reasons. It makes us want to abolish the vile hounds of the paparazzi to Neptune, but has nothing to say about media exploitation, a topic that has undergone a reckoning in recent years, as the culture at large has justly worked to rehab the reputations of former “hot mess” tabloid subjects 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. 

Our Call: Abela’s noble work in portraying Amy Winehouse goes to waste in the weirdly messy, tacky Back to Black. I wanted to like it, but it pushed me from willing party to apologist to harsh critic. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.