‘Back to Black’ review: Amy Winehouse remembered in insulting biopic

Amy Winehouse burned bright and fast in the cruel firmament of fame. Her voice, slick with whiskey and pain, sang of heartbreak and addiction with an intoxicating honesty. Her lyrics, inspired by her real and rough life, were celebrated and memorized, even as she fell to pieces before our eyes. The paparazzi and late-night comedians flocked like vultures, picking her apart from her beehive to her bloody ballet flats. And now, a new biopic has come to pillage her very bones. 

Named for her Emmy-winning album, Back to Black centers on Winehouse’s rise to fame, her romance with toxic muse Blake Fielder-Civil, and her struggles with bulimia and substance abuse. For good measure, screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, who scripted the John Lennon-inspired Nowhere Boy, also wedges in a mawkish thread about thwarted motherhood and a depiction of Winehouse’s father that is damn near saintly. 

Shoved within a frustratingly conventional musician biopic framework by director Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy, Fifty Shades of Grey), the result is a film that is most shocking how bland it is. Yet there’s a sly slant that feels downright insulting. Not only does Back to Black fail to capture the spirit of Amy Winehouse, it crassly presents her story as a cringeworthy cautionary tale. 

Back to Black plays like a funhouse mirror to Amy. 

Credit: Dean Rogers / Focus Features

In 2015, Asif Kapadia unveiled Amy, a celebrated documentary about Winehouse that featured interviews with her close friends and musical colleagues, ex-husband Fielder-Civil, and parents Mitch and Janis Winehouse. Using a slew of home movies intercut with archival footage of Winehouse’s performances, TV appearances, and talk show interviews, Amy offered audiences a look at who the English star was on stage and behind the scenes. The voices of her friends filled in the gaps left by her absence, painting a portrait of a young woman who dedicated herself to her music but loathed fame. 

The documentary also paints Fielder-Civil as a bad influence who toyed with Winehouse’s affections, got her hooked on hard drugs, and was an obstacle to her getting clean. Meanwhile, her friends depict her father as a louse who exploited her success and gave her bad advice, like that she didn’t need to go to rehab ahead of recording her second studio album, Back to Black. As her song “Rehab” goes, “I ain’t got the time, and if my daddy thinks I’m fine.” 

In the movie Back to Black, both men are given a far more sympathetic portrayal, one that practically exonerates them for their roles in Amy’s troubles and early demise. As for the friends who (per Amy and paparazzi reports) begged her to get help for her addiction issues, they are relegated to barely there supporting players, chiefly popping up at performances to cheer or look concerned. This script choice means the onscreen Amy — played by a determined Marisa Abela — is a lonely figure, leaning hard on these two men, as well as a beloved grandmother (Lesley Manville) who is crudely employed as a plot point. 

Jack O’Connell and Eddie Marsan give Blake Fielder-Civil and Mitch Winehouse movie makeovers. 

Credit: Dean Rogers / Focus Features

Jack O’Connell, the English actor who first won praise for the prison drama Starred Up, brings a movie star swagger to the role of Blake. Greenhalgh’s script is achingly stodgy in its storytelling, lumbering from one cliched moment to another: Musician has a bad night, but inspiration strikes and out comes the guitar. However, the meet-cute between Blake and Amy — while prolonged — is undeniably charming. 

It’s a seedy bar. She’s underage. He rolls in, flaunting gambling money won at the track. A drink leads to a game of pool, which leads to him coaxing her to sing. The chemistry between O’Connell and Abela sizzles like a freshly lit cigarette. You can tell it’s no good for either of them, but oh, the burn feels so good! To Taylor-Johnson’s credit, this introduction to their love is so enveloping that it invites us to understand how these two came together. Subsequent scenes, however, become a sloppy tumble of red flags involving hard drugs, domestic violence (committed by her), and devastating jealousy. 

Juxtaposed against all the tumult of Blake, Mitch seems to offer an eternal calm. Played by Eddie Marsan with a proud poppa grin, Mitch is presented as a father who believes in the occasional tough love advice, but who is also (tragically) blind to the peril his daughter is in until it’s too late. For instance, the infamous moment where Mitch urges Amy away from rehab is played as an honest mistake by a protective dad who doesn’t know how bad things have gotten. 

If you believe Amy, this is an egregiously generous portrait of the father/manager who pushed Winehouse to tour when she was at a breaking point — and hired a camera crew to follow them on a family vacation when she was in recovery. (Neither of these events is featured in Back to Black.)  While Taylor-Johnson insists the Winehouse family had “no involvement” in the execution of the film, Back to Black was approved by the Winehouse estate, which — per Billboard — is administered by Mitch Winehouse.

Going into the film, I didn’t know all this. And yet the fingerprints all over Amy’s story make it feel so greasily managed that it is hard to stomach. 

Back to Black reduces Amy Winehouse to a sexist cliche. 

Credit: Dean Rogers / Focus Features

The most interesting element of Back to Black is Amy’s relationship with her grandmother Cynthia, whom the real-life Winehouse idolized so much she had her tattooed as a pin-up on her left arm. The two connected over a love of jazz and fashion. In the movie, it’s Cynthia who first gives Amy her signature beehive in a tender bonding moment. These scenes are enriching, giving a sense of who Amy aspired to be outside of Blake’s wifey and “Daddy’s Girl” (as another Winehouse tattoo reads). But from the moment Cynthia is introduced, you can tell she’s doomed to die soon, just as you can when a World War II soldier mentions he’s got a swell girl back home. 

Manville brings a brassy warmth to Cynthia, a doting grandma but also a badass broad who knows the power of wearing cheetah print and a bold red lip. The film undercuts her by scripting every scene like it’s her last, complete with mournful stares and haunting life advice. We all know granny is going to die, and so we feel sorry for poor Amy who can’t see it coming. Using Cynthia’s death to create dramatic tension and as a low point for Amy might be sensible scripting, but it also reduces this complex woman to something that happened to her granddaughter. Then, incredibly, Amy is reduced as well, by the film’s insidious motherhood thread. 

Amy Winehouse deserves better than the baby subplot. 

Credit: Dean Rogers / Focus Features

In the movie, Amy repeatedly longs for a baby. She tells this to Blake, who scoffs. She says it to a random child in a convenience store. She moons over a baby before finally telling her dad, “Please take me to rehab.” 

Implied within this is the idea that it is more tragic Winehouse died so young because she could have been a mother. It’s not tragic enough that she was an incredibly talented woman who should have had years ahead of her to figure out her love life, boundaries, and identity beyond being a celebrity. Back to Black urges audiences to mourn for the theoretical babies that could have been. Because on top of being a wife, daughter, granddaughter, Grammy-winner, singer, and songwriter, Amy Winehouse could have been a vessel for a baby. As Amy looks sweetly at the chubby-cheeked infant she’ll never have, we’re meant to weep for that lost option alongside her. And frankly, I find that twisted. 

At best, the maternity thread is aiming to suggest Winehouse had simple — yet unattainable —desires, despite her worldwide fame and acclaim. Perhaps it’s intended to make her more relatable or likable. But, god, what could be more insulting to Winehouse’s memory than trying to make her either?

Amy Winehouse was famous because of her singularity. She sang like no other. She shined on stage and lashed out off it. She had a fashion sense that was trashy and classy, classic and modern. She was an original who brought something raw, moving, and beautiful to her songs. Why does she have to also be relatable? Why does she have to be softened with a tedious script, a baby subplot, and countless shots of Abela staring off morosely into the mid-distance? Winehouse was already fascinating, and her life story had plenty of dramatic events to choose from without a manufactured maternal angle.

To her credit, Abela’s performance is sincere, channeling yearning into her dialogue and the solid covers she performs of Winehouse’s songs. In the end, the overall portrait is sweet but shallow. The mischievousness of Winehouse is absent, as is the roaring heat of her rage. The film will fleetingly remind audiences of her eating disorder, domestic violence, and drug abuse, but the balance Back to Black strives for is a cuddliness that feels flimsy at best and condescending to the audience at worse.

This papering over of Winehouse and her story isn’t just bland and boring — it’s offensive. Rather than a warts-and-all portrayal of her and her inner circle, Back to Black offers garish sentimentality over complexity, smoothing away rough edges until all that is left of Winehouse are the broad shapes of her life and loss. In the end, the film suggests history isn’t only written by the winners, but also those losers looking to make a buck off exploiting the memory of the dead. 

Back to Black opens in theaters across the U.S. on May 17.