A near pitch perfect performance from Marisa Abela raises this warm and affectionate biopic of tragic retro torch singer Amy Winehouse above the usual standard of recent rock star flicks.
Director Sam Taylor-Johnson has already made a movie about a musician with her directorial debut Nowhere Boy, an intimate portrait of John Lennon's pre-Fab years and she reunites with that (very good) film’s scriptwriter Matt Greenhalgh for this sweet and sometimes torrid examination of Amy Winehouse’s personal life.
The music is here in all its crimson glory but Back to Black is more concerned with the late singer’s strong family ties, in particular with her anguished father, Mitch, and her wretched romance with her jailbird husband Blake Fielder-Civil, played with real flair by an amped up Jack O’Connell.
As an on-screen couple, he and Abela have got chemistry and smarts. Their tale of toxic co-dependency begins when they first meet by chance in The Good Mixer, the chosen watering hole of the Britpop mob a decade earlier, and there are sparks, a game of pool and the Shangri-Las on the jukebox. He’s a bad boy in a Fred Perry shirt and he really, really likes his drugs.
As Fielder-Civil, O’Connell is all swagger and little boy lost neediness. Winehouse’s former husband will forever be the villain of the piece but here Blake’s self-destructive urges are refracted through Amy’s eyes only. Both, however, are very insecure people terrified that they are about to be dumped.
Fuelled by straight vodka and hard drugs, the tragic swirl of noughties Camden Town is their playground. With her dishevelled bird’s nest hair and towering heels, Amy totters through neon-blurred and rain-slicked streets as her romance with Blake runs its seedy and tumultuous course.
Meanwhile, she battles with her exasperated record company and management (an unlikely professional relationship with pop music impresario Simon Fuller). As she says more than once, "I ain’t no Spice Girl."
Another abiding element of the Amy Winehouse narrative - one long set in stone by her fans - is that the other villain of the piece is her father Mitch. In Back to Black he is given a very sympathetic reading by the always great Eddie Marsan, who plays him as a parent sick with worry and a bit of a wide boy anxious to let him daughter make her own decisions.
Of course, the real villains here are the slavering packs of paparazzi who pursue Amy around London, taunting her so they can get another shot of the fallen idol, drunkenly sprawled on the streets.
Taylor-Johnson doesn't neglect live performances. Amy’s Grammy live link-up from London is delivered with glamour and old school pizazz and her combustible Glastonbury headliner in 2008 as Blake lingers in prison for assault is given plenty of screen time.
From London dive bar The Dublin Castle to venerable jazz mecca Ronnie Scotts, recording sessions and mega sales to battles with bulimia, drink and drugs, all the beats of the rock biopic are here but it’s the inner Amy that emerges.
Taylor-Johnson shoots the whole thing through a crisp and gauzily romantic lens and Abella’s fragile but determined face is in nearly every shot. A scene depicting Amy, like a broken-hearted gangster’s moll, leaving Wormwood Scrubs after visiting Blake, is like something from Get Carter.
The final word on the supernaturally gifted Londoner will always be Asif Kapadia’s harrowing 2015 documentary Amy and unlike that landmark work, Back to Black can be overly sanitised. However, it does a very good job of reclaiming a troubled soul back from tabloid infamy, victimhood and pearl clutching disapproval.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
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