Back to Black

That voice, all nasal whine and cigarette rasp. The raven-wing eyeliner. That signature hairdo, perfectly coiffured yet disheveled, a beehive mid-colony collapse. It was always easy to recognize Amy Winehouse, the jazz revivalist whose sultry, sardonic, soulful songs made her an unlikely megastar. Taking its title from her second and final critically-acclaimed blockbuster album, music biopic Back to Black gives you all those details you’ll recognize – but not much beyond that.

It’s the early 2000s, a time when girl power and casual homophobia went hand in hand. There’s an opening sequence in which Winehouse (Abela) gets fame and notoriety for “Stronger Than Me,” a song that calls her then-boyfriend Chris Taylor a ladyboy, a befuddling time capsule. But it’s not bad, Back to Black proposes, because it just shows that all of Winehouse’s woes come from her wanting a real man to treat her like a real lady. She thinks she finds one in Blake (O’Connell), a diamond geezer with nice tattoos and a quick wit. Of course, we all know the story from there: the Grammys, the Ivor Novellos, the headlines, the gossip pages, the rehab, the very public burnout, and Winehouse’s untimely but seemingly inevitable death at 27.

Weirdly, there’s something very Americanized about this very British musical story. All of Winehouse’s influences are presented as being from the USA, and director Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy, Fifty Shades of Gray) goes out of her way to make vocal comparisons to Lauryn Hill. But where the hell is Shirley Bassey, or Dusty Springfield, or Sandy Shaw, or Lulu, or Helen Shapiro, or any of the other British pop starlets and torch song singers of the 1950s and 1960s that were clear influences? Or even Cilla Black: the Liverpudlian songstress received a much more worthy biography in the 2014 miniseries Cilla, and that show was never afraid to get into the mire of her troubled relationships and professional darkness.

And that’s where Back to Black really crumples like a discarded cigarette packet. Amy Winehouse’s short life was a car crash, fueled by alcohol, drugs, and dysfunctional relationships, made worse by a mean streak and a vicious, violent temper. Moreover, she willingly leapt into the nihilist narrative. It’s like she wanted the fourth place on the Mount Rushmore of dead musicians alongside Charlie Parker, Sid Vicious, and Elvis. The appalling paparazzi intrusion left an undeniable photographic record of blood, grime, and decay. She was a crack addict whose teeth were rotting out of her head, but all Back to Black shows is one CG-created gap in a row of pearly whites. It’s the most sanitized version of rock & roll carnage imaginable, as Taylor-Johnson paints her as just a sad Sarf Laaahndan daddy’s girl who misses her nan.

It’s not just this Winehouse’s teeth that are gappy. Working from Matt Greenhalgh’s script, Taylor-Johnson vaults through significant moments in her life without giving them any real significance. Abela provides a reasonable imitation, even if her singing sounds less like Winehouse and more like a mix tape of Dinah Washington and Lily Allen. Occasionally she brings suitable fire, such as the sordid little meet-cute with Blake in a pub. But ultimately, she’s caught in too many reenactments that match the look but not the meaning.

Take Winehouse’s career-defining first shows at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club: Unless you know how important a venue that is in music history already, Back to Black does nothing to inform you. If you do know her story, then the omissions mount up, like no mention of the catastrophic gigs where she was too drunk to sing, and or the extremely generous portrayal of her dad/manager Mitch by Marsan. Then there is the bizarre non-appearance of Winehouse’s producer/creative partner Mark Ronson (namechecked twice but never seen) and her fiancée, Reg Traviss. They’re not the only people who go missing as supporting characters disappear without trace, only to reappear in crowd shots. Funnily, that’s how Back to Black treats Winehouse: You’ll get glimpses of her, but little more.