A new movie about the life of Amy Winehouse is currently in the works, with Prometheus star Noomi Rapace in talks to play the troubled British chanteuse. In America and August Rush director Kirsten Sheridan is assembling the biopic, shopping it around as part of the movie industry’s ongoing efforts to piss off Amy Winehouse’s dad (whose efforts to make his own Amy Winehouse movie don’t appear to have picked up much steam of late).
The dark-haired, soulful-eyed Rapace seems like a natural fit for the part of the “Rehab” singer, who died in 2011. (Rapace’s extensive experience portraying cinematic miseries probably won’t hurt, either.) Still, there’s no guarantee that the new movie—presumably titled Amy Winehouse, in classic biopic fashion—will ever see the light of day, or even that we’d want it to. The movie is still in early development, being shopped around at the American Film Market, and Sheridan’s track record isn’t encouraging. Winehouse was a complicated figure—a fact that Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy never shied away from—and it would be a shame to see Sheridan’s schmaltzy instincts bestow her with a sanitized legacy that didn’t reflect her actual life.