Year:2024

Runtime: 122 minutes

Directed by: Sam Taylor-Johnson

Written by: Matt Greenhalgh

Starring: Jack O’Connell, Marisa Abela, Lesley Manville, Eddie Marsan, Bronson Webb, Juliet Cowan

By Sarah Manvel

In 2009 writer Matt Greenhalgh and director Sam Taylor-Johnson collaborated on “Nowhere Boy,” which was about how John Lennon the young man became John Lennon the Beatle. Now in 2024 writer Matt Greenhalgh and director Sam Taylor-Johnson have collaborated on “Back to Black,” which is about how a low-level addict named Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) had the misfortune to be beloved by one of the greatest singers of all time, Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela). It’s pitched as a biopic about Ms Winehouse, but only through her relationship with the man who introduced her to hard drugs, inspired her most famous songs, and heavily contributed to her early death. It’s appalling.

The movie is built around the songs from the two albums Ms Winehouse recorded in her life, as if the songs she wrote/co-wrote were literal events the movie must depict literally. “Dad, take me to rehab” is said with a straight face. It’s awful. Poor Ms Abela is reduced to announcing to her record label that she must go live her life and then later that same day watching Blake lip-sync to The Shangri-La’s in a pub. Suddenly Amy is allowing her grandmother (Lesley Manville) to style her hair in a beehive and later is doing a radio interview about the success of the album “Back to Black” without any of the work going into making the album being shown. As if it was all Blake’s idea. Her producer Mark Ronson is name-dropped but never seen. Amy’s dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan) is shown interfering in business meetings, prompting Amy to swear and storm out. There are a few scenes of Amy writing songs, but for the most part the work that Ms Winehouse put into her career is ignored, as if her talent was innate instead of a skill she worked very hard at from earliest childhood. Ms Abela does her absolute best, and the best that can be said is that she doesn’t embarrass herself in a part designed to be embarrassing. When you think of the lovingly depicted scenes in “Nowhere Boy” of John Lennon and Paul McCartney meeting and building their partnership, it’s even more obvious how callously Ms Winehouse’s talent has been treated here.

There’s an early brief montage where Amy goes around Camden – which in her lifetime was a grotty shadow of its sixties heyday and is currently awash in redeveloped buildings housing Winehouse-themed tourist traps – with two mates but they barely speak or are seen again. The largest set-piece depictions of Amy’s performances are even strangely altered copies of videos with millions of hits on YouTube. Why re-enact the famous moment when Ms Winehouse disbelievingly won Record of the Year at the 2008 Grammys if you’re going to edit her speech? More to the point, when Amy’s friends don’t get to talk, why include a scene where one of Blake’s disgusting friends (Bronson Webb) encourages him to get back together with her?

Because the movie is using Ms Winehouse the same way people used her in life, that’s why. Her talent was so gargantuan so early on in her life that the people around her, starting with her family, decided to use that talent for themselves. Ms Winehouse was comfortable with her talent – even the earliest depictions of her gigs in Camden pubs make that clear – but deeply uncomfortable with people using her for her talent, which, even in this terrible showing, included her father and her beloved grandmother. Her own mother (Juliet Cowan) barely features, and probably wouldn’t have if they hadn’t decided to re-enact the moment from the Grammys. 

For poor Ms Winehouse, for reasons this movie doesn’t bother to consider, the closest she could get to love was with someone who didn’t seem to give a damn about her talent, only her money and the drugs that money could buy. The movie’s depiction of this relationship, in which Mr O’Connell masterfully weaponises a tiresome cheeky-chappy persona to guilt Amy into giving Blake whatever he wants, is entirely on Blake’s side. As if Amy was a train wreck that Blake stumbled across instead of causing with his relentless drug use, emotional manipulations and ceaseless selfishness. Of course Amy screamed and cried and got emotional. She was attempting to find even footing on ground constantly dug out from under her feet by people telling her they loved her. But it takes a certain style of misogyny to show Amy literally running across town when Blake snaps his fingers. 

Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect Ms Winehouse to be better treated in death than she was in life. In 2006 in real life Ms Winehouse made her second appearance on the music-themed game show “Never Mind the Buzzcocks.” The host, a third-rate comedian, took delight in taunting her about her tabloid reputation, but she gamely insulted him right back and (more importantly, in my view, as I watched from home) demonstrated such a vast knowledge of current music that her team won. By then it was obvious that underneath that enormous talent there was something really, really wrong with her. What made it worse was that she was a working-class young woman, unafraid to show her emotions and unable to hide her addictions in public, and the British tabloids were relentless in punishing her for both of those things. The jealousy of her talent made the punishment worse, because she didn’t have the class protection automatically offered to the rich in this country, and she didn’t have a team of people acting in her best interests instead of their own. She should have been the Beatles! But there wasn’t anybody on her side. “Back to Black” is just another piece of Winehouse exploitation bringing shame to everyone involved. The risk is it will smash Ms Abela’s career on the rocks before it’s had a chance. But that’s what our society likes to do to young women with big talent.

One final thing: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis did the music and recorded an original song, “Song for Amy,” for over the final credits. Considering Mr Cave’s own personal history of loved ones and addiction, his participation in this project might not have been the best choice.