‘Back to Black’ Review: You Know That This Amy Winehouse Biopic is No Good

It’s hard to forget the first time you hear a voice like Amy Winehouse’s, especially as a teenage girl in the early aughts. It was original, and she was just so cool, a standout in one of the best periods in British indie music. At the time, and even now, it feels impossible to separate Amy’s music from her highly publicized struggle with addiction, her lethal relationship with the British paparazzi, and–like Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and Cobain–her fatal overdose at just twenty-seven years old. Still, inspiring stories from her collaborators about her life and creative process have emerged. In interviews with “Back to Black” producer Mark Ronson (Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken”), he shares that Amy wrote the album’s title track in just a few hours. Unfortunately, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black, the latest dramatic biopic about the life of a musician, is completely disinterested in stories like Ronson’s and more invested in those printed by the Daily Mirror. 

Back to Black begins with a teenage Amy (Industry’s Marisa Abela) going through a memory box with her glamorous, beloved Nan (Lesley Manville). She’s an aspiring singer from Camden, inspired by her Nan’s vintage style and the music of Lauryn Hill and Sarah Vaughan. The film hints that Amy’s immediate family is broken (although that’s never explored), but her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan), is a doting cabbie who listens to jazz with his daughter and just wants the best for her–a far cry from his depiction as a fame-hungry opportunist in Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning documentary, Amy. She isn’t interested in fame, reaching the top of the charts, or winning awards, though. She knows she’s an original anachronism, telling her manager Nick Shymansky (Sam Buchanan), “I ain’t no Spice Girl.” While the film opens with Amy’s talent and love of music, it forgets that relatively quickly and can’t help but reveal its true intentions, teasing the audience about the substance abuse to come.  

The use of music in the film is perplexing, oscillating between recreations of well-known performances (Glastonbury, BBC Live Lounge) with Abela’s vocals and a diegetic soundtrack of a handful of Winehouse’s biggest hits. Playing Amy’s music does Abela no favors, no matter how close her voice may come to mimicking the original. When Amy sang, she meant every word, and that’s a tall order to emulate, especially because the film doesn’t seem to care about the meaning behind any of her lyrics. Sometimes, Abela comes close to embodying the woman we remembered, but screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh’s (Nowhere Boy, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool) construction of the character is both melodramatic and sanitized, limiting her from accessing Amy’s contradictions and forcing her to overact. Abela’s performance shines brightest when we momentarily forget that she’s playing a former star and not just a girl from North London struggling with her relationship, fame, and addiction. It’s clear that she admires Amy and wants to stretch for more than a passable impression, so it’s a shame that the screenplay doesn’t allow her to dig a bit deeper into the truth and not this pallid reconstruction.

Taylor-Johnson and Greenhalgh instead shift their attention to Amy’s tumultuous, volatile relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), creating a half-baked Sid & Nancy without any of the sensitivity or thematic verve.  After the film moves through the release of her debut album “Frank” in a flash, Amy’s producers reveal that she needs to write a new record if she wants to take her music to America. She’s angry and stubbornly flees the meeting, telling her team that she needs to start living if she’s going to create a new record. She heads to the pub and, seemingly within minutes, meets Blake, a charismatic, sofa-surfing dirtbag, and they hit it off. She tells him that she loves Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski; he (somehow) introduces her to The Shangri-Las. They play pool while “Know You Now” plays on the jukebox–he’s her fan and her type. Abela and O’Connell have strong chemistry, making it believable that the two could continue to break each other’s hearts. Their meet-cute is perfect to Amy, until Blake’s girlfriend, in her “fuck me pumps,” cuts their dalliance short. They’ll reconnect, though, because, as her Nan says, Amy has a thing for the bad boys. 

As Blake and Amy reunite and their relationship becomes even more volatile and addicting, so does her dependence on drugs and alcohol and her continued struggle with bulimia. The script is filled with bizarre, dark allusions to Amy’s impending death that often read as completely tasteless bits of foreshadowing. When they first meet, Blake looks into his pint like a crystal ball, claiming he can see Amy’s future in the golden reflections of his lager. Later, Amy says that Blake “saved her from death by boredom.” Amy’s family members, manager, and roommate, among other characters in the film, each make a point to warn her to stay away from everything from cigarettes to wine to cocaine. It’s almost comical how early and often characters point out these tendencies, acting as if she is fated to fall apart. Blake, who guilts her into trying hard drugs for the first time, is painted simply as a toxic boyfriend and not as a man who fueled her drug addiction. “The rest of the world is blaming me,” he cries, trying to absolve himself in the eyes of Amy and the viewer. With a script like this, Greenhalgh treats Amy’s death as a stroke of dramatic irony, washing the hands of everyone in her orbit clean. 

This isn’t Taylor-Johnson’s first foray into a dramatic biopic focusing on the life of a musician taken too soon, either. With Nowhere Boy, she delved into an early slice of John Lennon’s life in Liverpool when he fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll and formed The Beatles. Back to Black would have benefited from a similar creative approach. While the film doesn’t attempt to be a cradle-to-grave Wikipedia entry, Taylor-Johnson’s choices are misguided, as her camera lingers on Amy’s drunken stumbles and gleefully hurtles to her demise. To Taylor-Johnson and cinematographer Polly Morgan (The Woman King), depicting Amy’s point of view often just means blurring the edges of the frame to convey a drug-induced haze. The film tries to cover a lot of ground and, at times, attempts to be an impressionistic picture of a woman struggling with her own personal demons. Yet just last year, an auteur far more skilled in cinematic impressionism crafted an empathetic, sensitive portrait through the perspective of a woman trapped in a cage, and it feels impossible not to compare the two. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla includes similar stylistic details–a young girl alone in her bedroom waiting for her life to begin, a drug-fueled night with a dangerous paramour, a sky-high beehive and winged eyeliner. But that film never feels voyeuristic, nor does it punctuate its subject’s mistakes. Impressionism and first-person point of view can bring the subject to life in particularly vivid ways, but only if the filmmaker’s intent and execution are clear. Here, the focus is misplaced, neglecting Amy’s artistry in favor of her most painful moments.

The horrific struggles of Amy’s life are well-documented, and for a film titled after an album, it’s baffling how little time Taylor-Johnson spends on Amy’s creative process and songwriting prowess. The heartbreak she experienced from her relationship was, no doubt, the catalyst and inspiration for her songs, but Greenhalgh’s script never manages to fully connect her pain with the music. In one of the most visually striking moments in the film, Amy arrives in New York, and we see a montage of her walking through the city. She looks so tiny and wide-eyed as she crosses the busy street, and it almost feels like a hopeful trick. If she escaped her Camden flat and Blake, the world could be at her fingertips. While the moment provides one of the film’s only moments of warmth, we never spend any valuable time with Amy in the recording studio. “Back to Black” is an extraordinary album and piece of music with ‘60s girl group- and soul-inspired instrumentation serving as a backdrop for her clever lyrics and singular voice. There is plenty to mine here, but instead, we get a single moment of Amy crying in the booth as she sings the title track’s final notes. If you were unfamiliar with Amy’s music before viewing this film, connecting the dots and understanding how this album became such a phenomenon would be impossible.

Biopics are abundant in today’s landscape, but filmmakers aren’t beholden to a specific set of rules, and some have creatively switched up the formula when depicting women often remembered for their untimely deaths. Pablo Larrain chose to focus on one weekend of isolation and inner turmoil in Princess Diana’s life in Spencer; Sofia Coppola’s anachronistic Marie Antoinette is a visual confection with tragedy and empathy embedded in its framework; Quentin Tarantino beautifully saved Sharon Tate altogether in his alternate history Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood. Instead, Back to Black falls somewhere between the bland and formulaic Judy and the cruel, designed-to-be-divisive Blonde (down to the ethereal score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis). Where a filmmaker places focus on real-life women matters, especially if they want to disrupt any preconceived ideas the audience may have about their histories. Instead of depicting Amy as a once-in-a-generation artist known for her wit and vocal chops, Taylor-Johnson’s Amy is a caged bird who needs to be freed (yes, she inserts multiple shots of this literalized, overused metaphor) and, disappointingly, responsible for her own misfortune.  What’s worse still is that the creation of “Back to Black” is abruptly followed by an inexplicable scene in the liquor store, where, after purchasing two handles of vodka, she tells a child asking for her autograph that she wishes she could be her mom. This moment, along with a mean-spirited reveal from the paparazzi about Blake’s new girlfriend’s pregnancy, implies that Amy’s unfulfilled desire to be a mom sped up her death drive.  

Back to Black shouldn’t have side-stepped Amy’s well-documented addiction, but for a film that sincerely believes it is a portrait commemorating her life as a musician, it shouldn’t solely blame her for it either. When Amy says that she wants people to hear her voice and forget their troubles, it’s believable in the context of how her music plays for her fans around the world. Unfortunately, the film is hellbent on remembering her troubles and forgetting her singular talent. When the film’s unforgivable ending plays, it’s clear that creating a biopic about Amy Winehouse just thirteen years after her death was always a losing game. 

Grade: D

Focus Features will release Back to Black only in theaters on May 17, 2024.