Amy Winehouse Deserves a Better Biopic than ‘Back to Black’

The great, troubled Amy Winehouse, one of far too many artists who have streaked across the sky and burned out at age 27, is a fitting subject for a film. And thus, a film was made: Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning 2015 documentary Amy, an illuminating and grueling collage of the singer’s doomed brilliance. It’s sensitive and even-handed about Winehouse’s life, and damning of those many of us in the audience who, while admiring her work, cruelly made light of her struggles at the time.

It seems that a softer, more neatly packaged retelling of Winehouse’s life was desired by some. That explains the existence of Back to Black, a new fictionalized film from director Sam Taylor-Johnson (in theaters May 17). Written by Matt Greenhalgh (Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool) and starring Marisa Abela, Back to Black was made under the auspices of its subject’s estate, often a troubling sign for a biopic like this. When those with various stakes in the telling of a dead person’s story—financial ones, personal ones—seek to shape the narrative, what details might be elided?

In Back to Black, there are a lot. There is no mention, as there is in Amy, of the strange intrusions of Winehouse’s father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan). The reality camera crew he enlisted to follow him and, thus, his daughter as she slipped in and out of recovery is never seen. Lifelong friends have been excised, boyfriends omitted. Winehouse’s flint and hardness, so palpable in the documentary, have been sanded down to a girlish insouciance.

The Winehouse of Back to Black is a precocious phenom who goes blurring through the years, besotted and bedeviled. This is not a career film. Some major beats of Winehouse’s staggering success—her Grammy wins, her triumphant early concerts—are captured, but Back to Black is more concerned with Winehouse’s domestic life, particularly pertaining to her beloved nan (Lesley Manville) and the singer’s volatile relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell). Winehouse is shown as an assertive but fragile woman, battered by tragedy and subsumed by romantic obsession. She remains rather passive, a little girl lost.

In Amy, we do come to understand something similar, keenly and sadly: how Winehouse’s youth and inexperience were belied by the miraculous, deep plaint of her voice, of her beyond-her-years references. Old soul as she may have been, she was only in her early 20s when worldwide fame came calling and her mental health began to suffer. Back to Black doesn’t wrestle enough with that conflict, between image and identity. It offers only the simplest, most generic analysis—while saying very little about her likely psychological afflictions.

There is at least some dynamic character to the film. The scenes between Amy and her nan are touching and textured, cadenced like real life. The sexy and faintly ominous first meeting of Amy and Blake is staged at languid, seductive length. O’Connell is quite good at portraying the character as a ne’er-do-well with rakish appeal, his flecks of head-cocked menace an undeniable part of his draw. Abela’s performance is winning as its own creation, even if it fails in the larger project of manifesting Winehouse’s idiosyncratic humor and mettle.

It was decided that Abela would do her own singing in the film, which makes a certain kind of sense. Lip-synching might have been ghoulish, a strange half-resurrection of the dead. Abela can certainly carry a tune, and she convinces us of Winehouse’s singular vocal muscle. But then when one relistens to the real thing, it becomes glumly obvious what is missing in the film: the true pain and passion behind what Winehouse was doing, the feeling that she described as pouring out of her, as necessary as breath. Back to Black is a pleasant enough homage to what Winehouse sounded like, but it is only that.

Maybe it would help matters if the film offered more of Winehouse at work: showing her at her most competent and determined, how the supernova of her mind led her to such ecstatic highs. Yet Back to Black seems almost scared of its star’s creative furnace. It hovers at the edges of recordings, quickly lilts through little bouts of songwriting, as if cowed by a genius it doesn’t understand—or doesn’t want to understand.

Back to Black is not the worst of its genre. (Though this genre is, largely, a bad one.) Still, any estimation of the film crumbles the more time one spends diving back into the real Winehouse’s output—and maybe, watching Amy. Back to Black seems confident that its heart is in the right place. And maybe it is—the film seeks to honor and humanize a woman plagued by illness and hounded mercilessly by strangers. But true humanizing, that which has actual resonant and instructive value, is trickier, more complicated than Back to Black admits or allows.

A movie like this—about such a fiery, singular person—should not play like mere misty elegy, a brief recounting of happy memories and sad ones that amounts to a sentimental sketch of an artist. Where is the whir of the world as Winehouse saw it, the matrix of pleasure and heartbreak that so fascinated her? Where is the Winehouse who, in the full glare of her being, ought to be remembered?