Back to Black      2 stars

One genre of film that I really like is movies about the making of music. These are the ones where we see the process of coming up with and writing a good song. They can be either fictional or about a real artist. Unfortunately, we don’t get that in the new Sam Taylor-Johnson biopic called Back to Black, the movie about the rise and tragic end to British pop star Amy Winehouse (starring Marisa Abela) who died of alcohol poisoning back in 2011. Instead, the movie focuses mainly on her troubled romance to husband Blake (Jack O’Connell) who was addicted to drugs and alcohol and played a major part in allowing Winehouse to share in the addiction. We do get several stage performances of Winehouse and her disagreements with the record producers. (She could certainly stand up for herself.) But I didn’t see enough of her composing music and feeling it in the process, other than one scene early in the movie. Abela does a decent job portraying the singer, even using her own voice in some of the songs. (It’s unlike Elvis then where Austin Butler only did lip syncing.) Much better examples of artist biopics were Rocketman (Elton John), Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddy Mercury) and even Ray (Ray Charles). We also get too many scenes of her getting more tattoos, but we do see how that enormous signature beehive hairdo came to be. If you saw the documentary, Amy, from 2015 you would see some significant details that are left out of Back to Black. The movie treats her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan) far too sympathetically as he in reality only returned to Amy’s life after she became famous and did little to help her out of her addiction. Her record producer and band members are treated as mere background characters, and her bodyguard is left out altogether, even though in the movie she is hounded by the paparazzi. In the end the movie is reduced to one about a bad romance and I think we already have plenty of those.