Back To Black review: Cash-grab biopic doesn't bother disguising itself

Since the blockbuster success of the Queen movie Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018, a music biopic gold rush has been underway in Hollywood. Some of the resulting films—made as they are with the participation of the artist, or more often their estate—have found room for genuine creative flare (Rocketman, Elvis); more have been uninspired (Respect, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, Bob Marley: One Love), the filmmakers undoubtedly straitjacketed by the twofold restriction of the paint-by-numbers biopic format and the involvement of the music rights holders in the development process. (Rare is the officially authorized biopic that wishes to arrive at a truly unvarnished portrait of an artist.) Back To Black, director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s take on the Amy Winehouse story, might be the poorest yet of Hollywood’s post-Rhapsody bios.

Absent much vision or verve, Back To Black won’t quiet your nagging suspicion that it exists chiefly to cash in on the name of a dead artist, with all the potential box office as well as record and other ancillary sales to be made from mining the brand. No different from many a recent music biopic in that regard, the problem with Back To Black is that hardly anybody involved can muster the effort to disguise it.

Taylor-Johnson’s film begins in working-class Camden Town, London in 2002, when Winehouse was 18. Filling us in via flatly expository dialogue, Amy (Marisa Abela) and her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville) explain that Amy is an aspiring musician with a rebellious spirit and a fondness for jazz. “I ain’t no Spice Girl,” Amy tells the record label suits who subsequently sign her, promising to make her a star. But she will get the same cookie-cutter rise-and-fall biopic narrative applied before to countless musicians: Back To Black’s Amy will achieve enormous success followed by a crashing fall, her troubles foreshadowed in lines such as “Having a spliff’s like having a cup of tea” and “You like the bad boys, Amy Winehouse.”

Winehouse’s story is so recent and was so thoroughly covered in her lifetime that Back To Black was always going to have it tough justifying its own existence. No film is “too soon” if it can excavate deeper truths or find a fresh angle on a familiar story. But Back To Black does neither, the script—from Matt Greenhalgh, writer of 2007’s Ian Curtis biopic Control, a notable triumph in a hard-to-crack genre—having a sub-Wikipedia-level grasp on events and, worse, next to no insight into who Winehouse was as a person.

The basic bullet-point details are related: that partner (and eventually husband) Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) was an obsessive love for Winehouse; the pair experienced a very public descent into drug addiction; Amy’s father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan), was a proud if somewhat ineffectual parent. (For some, that last point may not be emphasized enough in the film, which was made with the approval of the real Mitch Winehouse, now administrator of his late daughter’s estate.) There’s scant life in the telling, though. The mostly staid direction from Taylor-Johnson fails even to sell the music, with sequences in which Abela-as-Amy performs the hits expressing little of the dark allure of Winehouse’s wry neo-soul.

A recreation of Winehouse’s infamous 2008 Glastonbury set makes an impact, Taylor-Johnson’s camera staying fixed on the inebriated Amy as she struggles through a performance of “Me & Mr. Jones” while attempting to interact with the screaming crowd. There are regrettably few scenes that attempt to put us in Winehouse’s headspace like this, to give an impression of what it was like to be in the eye of a media storm as Winehouse was at her height. As for what inspired such distinct and personal music, what psychological factors might have led Winehouse into addiction and a toxic relationship, or what might explain any of the many demons that seemed to plague her, Back To Black shows next to no curiosity.

As with Bohemian Rhapsody and Freddie Mercury, and as with so many recent music biopics and their subjects, Back To Black doesn’t want to uncover the human being behind the icon. Instead, the film makes Winehouse almost saintly. There are glimpses of cruelty in the Amy Winehouse of Back To Black, but the film ultimately presents her as a martyr, tragically destroyed by fame, as well as a genius whose craft is left mysterious to us—the iconic image only ossified further.

This gives Abela precious little character to play, leaving the Industry star adrift for much of the movie. The uniformly reliable Marsan and Manville can’t locate much personality in their parts, either, the screenplay sketching Dad and Nan only as undefined salt-of-the-earth types. Only the ever-vital O’Connell can find a pulse in his role, the much-vilified Blake lent a wide boy charm, even a grotty pathos by the actor. O’Connell is a blessing for Back To Black, and a welcome lively presence in the film’s baggiest patch, as Amy and Blake violently break up, make up, take drugs, and violently split again. The film has so little perspective on any of this, meanwhile, that it ends up doing little more than gawp.

If Back To Black does have a point to make—if it has any perspective at all—it’s that the media, not addiction or any of the other issues that the singer had roiling under the hood, finally drained the life out of Amy Winehouse. One effective scene finds Amy and Mitch having a quiet moment in a greasy spoon diner, the pair’s faces flickering with the relentless camera flashes of paparazzi waiting outside the window. It’s a point made without a hint of irony, the film making minimal effort to understand Amy Winehouse—what made her tick, or indeed even what made her great—while carrying out what would seem its primary purpose: Treating a late, great musician as a property to exploit.