![Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2024/04/08/TELEMMGLPICT000373159285_17126053850760_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Back to Black, review: this compassionate Amy Winehouse biopic avoids the blame game
Marisa Abela does a sterling job as the troubled star – but this overly cautious drama ducks away from saying anything truly enlightening
![Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2024/04/08/TELEMMGLPICT000373159285_17126053850760_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The dangers of exploiting Amy Winehouse all over again are rife in any biopic. The makers of Back to Black have listened to what could have become an outcry, and spared us (and her) from certain dark moments in this compassionate portrait – including her drug overdose in 2008 and the drinking binge that led to her death aged 27 in 2011. (They may have shot scenes with Marisa Abela’s Amy being stretchered away by paramedics, but these haven’t made the final cut.)
There’s also the issue of trying to match Winehouse’s singing voice – an impossible dream for any performer. Given the task at hand, Abela, who was quite a force in the BBC series Industry, approximates that smoky yowl pretty well. The pre-emptive criticisms she has faced on that front feel unduly trumped-up. Had they dubbed in Winehouse’s real voice, it would have sabotaged the intense, bolshy presence that really suits Abela for the role.
We could get tangled up in these editorial choices all day. What the film is great at doing is telling the story behind the song Back to Black – that immense, stomping, unsparing dirge about the breakdown of Winehouse’s relationship with future husband Blake Fielder-Civil – which became the title track of her astonishing second (and alas, final) album.
Screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh (Control), something of a biopic specialist, has reunited with Sam Taylor-Johnson, who made her 2009 feature debut with his early-years-of-John Lennon script, Nowhere Boy. By concentrating on the relationship, the road they’ve taken here is too narrow, but I’m sympathetic to the problem: sharpening your focus always gives biopics more lift-off than vaguely trying to cram everything in.
We await a dangerous kind of love story, then – mutually abusive, precariously unbalanced, and sinking Amy into her ever-worsening drug addictions. Taylor-Johnson uses the pair’s hard-partying melodrama as a potent hook, with some of the populist savvy that made her adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey a megahit.
![Marisa Abela and Jack O'Connell as Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2024/04/08/TELEMMGLPICT000373159290_17126122695730_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Amy, already famous – and disillusioned – after her 2003 album Frank, is drinking alone in her favourite Camden boozer when Blake saunters in. It’s the film’s standout scene by a distance, and thankfully the longest. She can’t believe his chutzpah in pretending not to recognise her. Jack O’Connell is ideally cast as Blake, gifting his part with such self-admiring scuzzball charisma, we’re nearly able to buy how instantly smitten Amy is.
Yet the biographical treatment still comes off as shallow, and sometimes evasive: Amy’s self-immolation isn’t affected by any other relationships, save with alcohol and the press. The film is bound to be dissected for all the ways it ducks playing the blame game. While Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy pointed fingers at, among others, her father for (it implied) milking her recording career and not having her best interests at heart, here Eddie Marsan’s Mitch is pretty much exonerated, coming off, at worst, as lovingly misguided in not agreeing to rehab sooner.
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With Lesley Manville on sweet form as her beloved nan, Cynthia, the film etches the family relationships with placating warmth. (Her family have endorsed the finished film but Taylor-Johnson insists they got no say over the script.)
The grotesque hounding by the tabloids certainly isn’t ignored, though: indeed, a doorstep taunt about Blake having a child with his “same old safe bet” is what tips her into the final fade-out. We know her infatuation was epic, and yes, she understood love as a losing game. It’s rough to watch her so flatly defeated by it – but because of the cautious gloss, the film is perhaps less enlightening or truly tragic than it might have been.
15 cert, 122 min. In cinemas from Friday April 12