The moment filming began on Back to Black – the new feature film about singer Amy Winehouse – there was an inevitable outpouring of emotion. “Is it possible to make a biopic about an exploited young star that isn’t itself exploitative?” asked The Guardian, while online fans reacted with vitriol to in-costume shots of Marisa Abela, the breakout star of BBC show Industry, who plays Winehouse. You could practically hear the anguish echo around the internet.
In fact, a biopic of the Jewish songstress seems the inevitable, if wearying, next step. Even before she died in 2011, tragically succumbing to alcohol poisoning at just 27 years of age, Winehouse’s life was being raked over by the red tops. Indeed, some of the most poignant moments in Back to Black come as Abela’s dishevelled, drunken Winehouse is crowded by paparazzi as she wobbles her way back to her Camden house or pops to the local off-licence for bottles of liquor.
Marisa Abela, who is Jewish, said she felt a 'connection' to the star
For anyone who lived in Britain through the early 2000s, it’s impossible to forget just how hounded Winehouse was by the tabloids. “Amy on crack” ran one particularly salacious front cover off The Sun in 2008, alongside a picture of her smoking from a glass pipe. The shots of her stumbling barefoot through London’s streets seemed to fill the papers almost daily. By 2009, she won an injunction against paparazzi agency Big Pictures under the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act.
By then, Winehouse was in the grip of fame. Her 2003 debut album Frank put her on the map, but it was her sophomore LP Back to Black, released in 2006 by Island Records and co-produced by Mark Ronson, that sent the beehive-sporting singer stratospheric. Inspired in part by her turbulent relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, it sold more than 16 million copies worldwide and led to Winehouse winning a then-record five Grammy awards, including Record and Song of the Year.
The film Back to Black largely concentrates on the period between Frank and the creation of Back to Black, notably after Fielder-Civil (a cocksure Jack O’Connell) leaves Winehouse briefly to return to his ex-girlfriend. What results is a doomed love story, its veins pumped full of angst. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Matt Greenhalgh, who previously collaborated on 2009’s Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon’s life before the Beatles, do their best to conjure a celebration of Winehouse’s talent, rather than ruminate on her demise.
It shows Winehouse enjoying a warm Jewish family life with her “nan” Cynthia (Lesley Manville) and her cab-driving father Mitch (Eddie Marsan). As Abela – who is Jewish – recently told Harper’s Bazaar: “The more I got to know her, the more I felt a major connection to this spiky Jewish girl from London who had a lot to say and was really quite unafraid…I remembered how I felt when I was young, seeing that woman who was proud and cool, wearing a big Star of David in between a cleavage and a nice bra.”
Abela also performed every song herself, an impressive but necessary feat. As she explained on The Jonathan Ross Show: “I knew Sam and I felt the same way that whoever was going to play this part needed to be Amy from the inside out.” It’s work that pays off, with Abela’s vocals shimmering through the film – although others disagree. When clips of the film went online, people took to social media to voice their displeasure. “This is the worst karaoke I’ve ever seen. Scrap it, just scrap it,” remarked one viewer on X/Twitter.
A bigger criticism might be that it’s rather coy on the subject of her drug dependency. When she first meets Fielder-Civil, she chides him for snorting cocaine the morning after their first night spent together. But the film doesn’t linger on her transition from sceptic to user. Her father discovers a glass pipe in her pocket, while Fielder-Civil implores: “We’re drug addicts, Amy.” But the film holds back from showing too much depravity. Instead, it reminds us that when she dies, it was during a long period of sobriety.
As honourable as its intentions are, it’s hard not to think that Back to Black is the latest addition to the cottage industry that sprung up around the late Winehouse. Multiple biographies and memoirs were published after her death, including My Amy: The Life We Shared by her teenage-years friend Tyler James and Amy, My Daughter by Mitch Winehouse. Of the latter, the New York Journal of Books wrote: “A fitting tribute, heartfelt and heart-rending, as a parent’s guilt over the fact that despite his best efforts his child is gone for ever vibrates off every page.”
Winehouse’s father was also involved in pursuing a now-shelved attempt to bring the singer back to audiences via a hologram tour, with proceeds going to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, the charity founded to aid vulnerable youngsters suffering from emotional and substance abuse issues. Forever blamed by Mitch for his daughter’s death, Fielder-Civil went on Good Morning Britain to voice his objections. “It’s old footage, it can’t be anything new,” he said, adding he was “concerned” that “there’s no human element to it.”
Winehouse Snr has often cut a controversial figure when it comes to the legacy of his daughter, never more so than when he went public with his thoughts on Asif Kapadia’s 2015 non-fiction film Amy, which evocatively traced the singer’s rise and fall. The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary, though Winehouse’s father called it a “negative, spiteful and misleading” portrayal of his daughter. Additionally, he tweeted: “Amy will not get an Oscar though. Just Asif Kapadia. That is what this is all about...Asif. He’s fooled everybody.”
The film was unveiled at Cannes in 2015, less than four years after Amy’s death, and Kapadia always knew he would face accusations of it being far too soon to approach the singer’s life. “That was an uncomfortable part of the process,” he told me, when I interviewed him before the film festival that year. “But James [Gay-Rees, Amy’s producer] and I [decided] it was an important story to tell about the world we live in now. It’s not that far away; this is what can happen when things unravel and get out of control.”
Kapadia’s documentary was just one of several to take on the Winehouse story. In 2021, BBC2 broadcast Reclaiming Amy, a family-sanctioned portrait of the singer to mark the tenth anniversary of her death. Narrated by Winehouse’s mother Janis, and accompanied by home- movie footage and photographs, it emerged as a rejoinder to Kapadia’s Oscar-winner. In the film, her father – who also has warmly endorsed Abela in Back to Black – even spoke about the nervous breakdown he had after the release of Amy.
Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse and Jack O'Connell as Blake Fielder-Civil in the film
Intriguingly, in 2015, Universal Music UK – owners of Winehouse’s music – took the unusual decision to destroy all of her demos to ensure these works-in-progress could not be turned into material for public consumption. If this suggests there was a limit to how much a corporation wanted to cash in on an artist shortly after her death, profits will still be made from licencing tracks from the Back to Black movie and from the creation of the forthcoming Back to Black: Songs From The Original Motion Picture album.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that when an artist dies tragically young, whether it be Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison, there will always be fervent interest from fans, hungry for every morsel. The question is, how much more of Winehouse’s life will be pored over? If Back to Black offers the final word on her life and work, then so be it. But it’s hard not to feel that the Amy Winehouse bandwagon will roll on. A Broadway musical has long been talked about. You can just imagine the Tony awards being polished already.
Back to Black opens in cinemas on 12 April
