All through Back to Black, I kept thinking of a hilarious, spot-on moment in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Tim Meadows’ hedonistic music man half-heartedly tries to scare off John C. Reilly’s titular rock legend when Dewey catches him and others getting high in a bathroom. “We’re smoking reefer, and you don’t want no part of this shit,” Meadows’ character dramatically tells Dewey while a topless lady, for some reason, hangs out in the background.
As that biopic spoof showed us, when drugs enter the picture, that’s when the story of an important musical figure begins its rocky road from tragedy to recovery to redemption. In Back to Black, it happens the day after Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) and Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) consummate their love. She catches him taking a couple bumps of blow, which Winehouse (who’s more of a reefer gal) refuses. But as we all know by now, it isn’t long before she wants a part of that shit.
Released just a few months after Bob Marley: One Love hit theaters, Back is yet another tale of a trailblazing but troubled music icon who died way too young. And it does what every rock ’n’ roll biopic does. Yes, a lot of it is accurate. But much like when you hear a secondhand anecdote, the story is told in a condensed, embellished and heavily dramatized fashion. At times, it feels like Katt Williams is telling this woman’s story.
Just like when she began her feature-film debut with the John Lennon tell-all Nowhere Boy, Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson once again conjures up a biopic that seems less about the music and more about the relationship between a British pop phenom and that phenom’s family. Winehouse’s deadbeat dad turned manager (played here by Eddie Marsan) is a more prominent figure in this story, practically encouraging her to be the pop star he apparently failed to be. Another key family member is loving grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), a former club singer who allegedly gave Amy the inspiration to put her hair in a beehive. She also gets cancer, which of course sends Winehouse even deeper into the abyss.
Sure, we get performances in which Abela, who does her own singing, mimicks Winehouse’s signature moves (those slithery, back-and-forth head nods!) like a Vegas celebrity impersonator. But Winehouse fans will most likely be unnerved by how little time is devoted to her years actually creating music. (Producers and longtime collaborators Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi are given way-too-brief shout-outs.)
From the way Back tells it, Winehouse stumbled into her stardom as a retro-soul goddess. Along with getting her hooked on all the drugs, on-again/off-again partner Fielder-Civil is the one who hipped her to heartbreak-heavy soul tunes from girl groups like The Shangri-Las, leading Winehouse to record the hit album — the one from the movie’s title — that turned her into a worldwide sensation. (Sidebar: Back is a monster, but I’ll always be a Frank guy.)
What’s truly insufferable about Back is that it’s a portrait of a shining star that makes said star look more like a flaky, insensitive, petulant fuckup than a talented artist. Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh (who wrote the generic Gloria Grahame biopic Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool) mostly characterize Winehouse as a lonely, friendless lush, so wrapped up in forging a toxic, Sid-and-Nancy-style bond with a selfish, unsupportive piece of shit (O’Connell nails Fielder-Civil’s fedora-wearing douchiness) that she forgets about her aspirations of becoming the next Sarah Vaughan.
Anyone who’s seen Asif Kapadia’s excellent documentary Amy (which I reviewed for the Scene nearly a decade ago) knows that Winehouse had significant personal issues (including bulimia and depression), which Back only hints at. The doc also portrayed Winehouse as a callow but brilliant singer-songwriter, someone who worked hard to make soulful poetry about love and loss. She had friends (including celebs like stateside rapper Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def) who were there for her at her highly publicized lowest. Although Taylor-Johnson gives the gone-too-soon Winehouse the triumphant climax and peaceful ending she deserved in Back to Black, we have to go through some histrionic, jumbled bullshit before we get to it.
As Amy herself would say, what kind of fuckery is this?
