Back to Black film review — no no no to this syrupy Amy Winehouse biopic

Your heart may sink a little at the thought of Back to Black, the new biography of the late singer Amy Winehouse from director Sam Taylor-Johnson. It will sink more watching it. The story is intensely sad: a gifted, fragile woman dead at 27 after struggles with drink and drugs. Her music remains in a different creative galaxy to this dispiriting film, which is at once twee and ghoulish.

Winehouse is played by Marisa Abela, giving us a version of the singer as man-mad Camden sparrow. She captures her subject’s speaking voice well enough to make you wish she was delivering better dialogue. (“I don’t care about the fame game!”) 

Writer Matt Greenhalgh and director Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy, Fifty Shades of Grey) make a fearful combination. Greenhalgh presents scenes from life like a cartoon strip. Taylor-Johnson adds a steady pour of syrup. The soft focus forever underscores that, yes, Winehouse was a chronic romantic. She also had demons, moxie, a raw London wit and razored intelligence, most of which are nowhere in sight.

The music mainly arrives in showcase performances, in the style of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Winehouse’s gifts as a songwriter don’t hold much interest. What we get instead is a pair of doomed love stories. One involves Winehouse’s husband Blake Fielder-Civil, a habitual heroin user played by Jack O’Connell, fresh from the gym.

The other is that between Winehouse and her father, Mitch. He was enraged by being portrayed as less than attentive to his daughter in Amy, the acclaimed 2015 documentary. Here, Eddie Marsan plays him as loving everydad. (The new film comes endorsed by the Winehouse estate.) The real villains in Back to Black are the fiendish paparazzi. For them, quite rightly, there is only the scorn we reserve for those who see opportunity in tragedy.

★★☆☆☆

In UK cinemas from April 12 and US cinemas from May 17