Back to Black

This powerful, and painful, look at the doomed singer refuses to treat Amy Winehouse the way we all collectively did when she was alive: a wind-up toy to be knocked down.

As a society one of our greatest collective shames is, or should be, how we treated singer Amy Winehouse.

She was a blazing talent who seemed to come out of nowhere from the Cockney backstreets of London, an anachronistic throwback to 1950s/60s jazz crooners. She could fold and bend notes seemingly without regard to music scales, and made an instant impression with her beehive hairdo and seemingly troweled-on eyeliner.

Winehouse also had readily apparent substance abuse problems and intertwined romantic turmoil. She become a simultaneous pop culture icon and joke, wowing us with a new song or moment in the spotlight, then turning up with missing teeth, new tattoos and ratty ballerina shoes. Pursued relentlessly by the paparazzi, she became fodder for tabloid covers and late-night comic barbs. People openly tittered about how she would soon turn up dead.

I’m ashamed to say I’m one of those who laughed.

“Back to Black,” the new biopic about Amy Winehouse starring relative unknown Marisa Abela in the title role, is a powerful and painful look at a troubled soul whose titanic talent was both her boon and her burden.

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, in their sensitive but sobering approach to this extraordinary young woman, refuse to do what we did when Winehouse was alive: treat her as a wind-up toy to be spun around for our amusement and then knocked down.

This biopic was endorsed by her estate and includes the rights to all her major songs, including the titular one about love and loss. But it’s no candy-coated hagiography that glosses over Winehouse’s mental health struggles, substance abuse and frequent bouts of domestic violence — as an abuser, not just a victim.

Everything starts and ends with Abela’s performance. If she couldn’t convince us to pass for Winehouse, in her distinctive appearance and sound, the whole film falls apart before it gets started. Fortunately, Abela is an astonishingly close match, both before and after Amy’s embrace of what became her signature look.

Even more amazing, she sings all of Winehouse’s songs in her own voice, and I dare you to listen to the original recordings and easily tell which is which. Just as Winehouse seemed to arrive all at once big as day, Abela announces herself in a deeply lived-in performance that grants us full view to her character’s inner despair.

The story concentrates on three of Winehouse’s primary relationships: with her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan), who instilled in her a deep love of jazz; with her beloved Nan (Lesley Manville), who was her emotional support and style inspiration; and with Blake, her erstwhile boyfriend and husband played by Jack O’Conner.

Her first meeting with Blake is depicted with incredible magnetism and charisma. As soon as they appear onscreen together, it seems like they are pulled together. A happenstance meeting in a pub, after Winehouse had already enjoyed her first blush of fame, is given even more weight by the fact he doesn’t know who she is.

Blake introduces Amy, who was already an enthusiastic drinker, to hard drugs. Most movies of this sort would fall back on portraying him as the bad guy who tempts a rising star in order to entrap them. In fact, she is the ardent pursuer, essentially flinging aside Blake’s current girlfriend like so much chaff.

Any time he pushes her away, or even tries to carve out a little space for himself next to this world-famous person, Amy snaps with aggression — scratching, punches, kicking. Blake turns up from time to time with fresh cults and welts. But he repeatedly forgives her and returns. It’s a hard portrait of a side of domestic abuse most people won’t even talk about.

In the latter portions of the story, Amy becomes a virtual prisoner her London flat, the press hounds continually circling like jackals. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: they lash out at the press, bringing more controversy and trouble with the law, which only attracts more poisonous attention.

Through it all, Amy continues to create astonishing music, with lyrics that often comment directly on her trials and troubles. She is so devoted to Blake, and the idea of eventually becoming a wife and mother, that she can’t separate her self-image as a singer from this cherished vision.

There are some who will say “Back to Black” is just another sympathetic fluff job for yet another artist who threw their life away over challenges that seem insubstantial to regular folks. People crave fame and fortune like a drug, but the Amy Winehouse seen here used drugs to cope with the deadly side effects that come with doing what she most wanted: to sing, and be seen.