Who Was Amy Winehouse? This Musician Biopic Has No Idea

DIRECTED BY SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON/2024

Poster for BACK TO BLACK (2024)

As a casual Amy Winehouse fan, I knew three things about her before seeing Back to Black: 

  1. Her voice was singular
  2. Her style was idiosyncratic
  3. Her tragic death came at age 27 because of her struggle with substance abuse

After watching Back to Black, this is still all I know about the artist behind “Valerie,” “Rehab,” and the album Back to Black. This begs the question: Who on earth is this movie for? I’m not out on musician biopics on principle, but each year I’m out on more and more of them. This year’s Bob Marley: One Love left me with no insight into why his his music has persisted decades beyond his untimely death, and I suspect Back to Black will leave those new to Winehouse with similar questions about her legacy (or why she has one at all). Winehouse devotees have certainly already consumed the 2015 documentary Amy, online clips of her performances, and her recently published journals. What about a boilerplate drama with no point of view will draw them in? 

(L to R) Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse and Jack O'Connell as Blake Fielder-Civil in director Sam Taylor-Johnson's BACK TO BLACK, a Focus Features release. Credit : Courtesy of Dean Rogers/Focus Features

Back to Black has no idea who Winehouse was or any perspective on the people or events of her life. Like One Love, it is an auto-pilot recitation of her Wikipedia page (as well as moments collected in the Amy documentary), stringing events in order of their occurrence but with little causation, momentum, or consistent motivation. (Case in point: Her mother is M.I.A. for most of the film until she isn’t, with no explanation for her absence or return.) Though Marisa Abela pulls off a reasonable impersonation of the singer-songwriter’s accent, she (and frankly, everyone else) can’t be successful with such an underdeveloped script. The lack of interest in anyone’s interiority is baffling, leaving you only to focus on superficial details like the cringeworthy millennial fashion. (Fedoras? Giant belts? Popped collars on prison jumpsuits? Oof, it’s all there.) Winehouse can’t be separated from her sartorial choices, but it shouldn’t need to be said that one’s clothing is not their personality.

Winehouse also can’t be separated from her problems with drugs and alcohol, but Back to Black gives them so much attention it seems to revel in her suffering. The camera’s most loving gazes—in slow-motion with dreamy lighting—are reserved for her consuming of illicit drugs and subsuming herself in a toxic relationship with a scumbag bloke of a husband (Jack O’Connell). Perhaps the intent was to convey the high she felt in the moment, but it feels more like a romanticization of her greatest pain. This biopic shows the most interest in her falling apart, which at best, is a waste of time given how the British press documented much of it in real-time. At worst, it’s reducing her short life to her lowest moments, not judging her addictions but not attempting to understand them, either. Since Back to Black is not educational or even empathetic for its viewers, it just becomes a painful slog. This isn’t just a low point for musician biopics—it’s the worst new movie I’ve seen this year.