Watch on Deadline
Related Stories
Focus Features Sets Early Summer 2024 Release For Amy Winehouse Biopic Back To Black
Brokeback Mountain Getting 20th Anniversary Re-Release This Summer
Its a measure of Winehouses accelerated life that it only takes 20 minutes to take us from a family party to her debut album and the first blush of fame.
Even then, she is headstrong, stonewalling her managements insistence that she stop playing her guitar onstage (although she did later drop it altogether) and taking time out to live her life and find new material for songs from that lived experience (although one of her biggest hits was a cover of The Zutons song Valerie in 2007).
Interestingly, all these contradictions start to add up, especially when Winehouse goes from saying, Class-A drugs are for mugs, to smoking crack cocaine, which is quite radical in itself for a biopic but also signals, in a very honest way, that we arenevergoing to get to the bottom of this story.
Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in ‘Back to Black’Dean Rogers/Focus Features
The meat of the film, but not the focus, is Winehouses relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, who gets off so very,verylightly.
Played by Jack OConnell, Blakey is the catalyst that sparks the singers very public descent into drink and drug-addled infamy (Youve got an eye for the bad boys, says Nan, which is putting it mildly).
But, again, Taylor-Johnson plays an interesting game with the truth here; its all very well to wonder where the adults were and her naive father Mitch pays off a lot of bad press in that regard, thanks to a very touching performance byEddie Marsan but these decisions were her own, and Taylor-Johnson makes that a tentpole, which again runs counter to the sexist candle in the wind narrative that grows up around so-called difficult female artists.
At the heart of it is relative newcomerMarisa Abela, who excels when shes free of delivering expositional biopic dialogue and justbeingAmy Winehouse(a brief, verite-style sequence on the streets of Manhattan is quite breathtaking).
In those moments, we get a sense of Amy Winehouse on the rise, a superhero origins story in which certain elements coalesce to produce the elegantly surly, coifed and tatted icon represented on the poster (although the film hedges its bets as to whether the famous beehive was inspired by The Shangri-Las Mary Weiss or The Ronettes Ronnie Spector).
Title:Back To BlackDistributor:Focus FeaturesRelease date:May 17, 2024Director:Sam Taylor-JohnsonScreenwriter:Matt GreenhalghCast:Marisa Abela, Jack OConnell, Eddie Marsan, Lesley ManvilleRating:RRunning time:2 hr 2 min
