Marissa Abella lifts up flawed Amy Winehouse biopic

Marissa Abella in Back to Black.

Courtesy of Dean Rogers/Focus Features

Fans regularly make movies about famous musicians’ successful lives, but they also like to scrutinize the results. Or to misquote Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division and the subject of a fairly good music biography (He controls), Love will tear apart any work of fan service if it spoils the story, paints the subject matter in an unflattering light, or, worst of all, distorts the music with imitations that barely rise above the level of karaoke. (Think, if you dare, of Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin Beyond the sea.)

On the other hand, there’s also something annoying about biopics that make actors lip-synch to original songs, like Naomi Ackie did in hers. I wanna Dance With Somebody Or, less successfully, Dennis Quaid Big balls to shoot! Especially if it means that access to the original recordings or even the rights to the songs in the first place requires that the script deal with the subject’s vices, dark side, or just less obvious secrets.

You might say it’s no win either way, except that box office draws movies like this Rocket man or bohemian rhapsody It suggests there’s plenty of gain to be had if a biopic hits the right sweet spot — somewhere between hagiography and sacrilegiousness that sends viewers out humming the results.

This Goldilocks zone is clearly what the filmmakers are getting behind Back to black Our goal was with this carefully considered portrait of the late Amy Winehouse, and they largely succeeded. It was directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Matt Greenhalgh – who also happened to write He controls Beside Nowhere, mana portrait of John Lennon as a young man and Taylor-Johnson’s first directorial experience – Back to black She, like her heroine, is flawed and fallible but often deeply moving.

Much of the credit goes to star Marissa Abella, best known for her work on HBO industry, Which manages to highlight Winehouse’s distinctive blend of fragility, intelligence and brutal self-destruction. Sexuality bursts from her, like the famous beehive of hair, a heavy crown full of want and need, vanity and insecurity in equal measure. In terms of strict acting, it is a thrilling showcase of performance.

Musically, Abella is somewhat less convincing. Not necessarily a singer by trade, the actress reportedly took hours and hours of music lessons to get to a place where she could imitate Winehouse’s singing on stage. But the end result still sounds like it was autotuned up the wazoo, and more crowded with Coloratura’s gorgeous graphics of note-bending and wailing. At one point, Abella as Amy insists that she’s not a rocker, but a jazz woman, and fans of Winehouse’s work know how that shines in her dynamic control. She won’t let it rip until just the right moment, but the shows go on Back to black You always feel the rush to get to the gospel-Motown style show stuff, like a contestant on a TV talent show with only 30 seconds to impress the judges.

Perhaps the problem is recency bias that makes viewers more willing to appreciate performances from the still very familiar Winehouse catalog that they know better, hit singles or more popular performances. One example near the end was the night Winehouse played the Grammy Awards via satellite in London the night she won Best Song for “Rehab.” That turn of note has been practically recreated here, and Abella gets every hip swing and jaw twitch, wearing an exact replica of the Dolce & Gabbana dress that Winehouse wore. For many viewers, this is exactly what they came for. However, others may be disappointed that we never get to see that night when Winehouse told her friend backstage that none of this was as fun as it was when she was on drugs, as chronicled in Asif Kapadia’s excellent documentary. Amy.

Kapadia’s doc has been criticized by Winehouse’s father, Mitchell, perhaps because it appears so poorly edited as someone keen to cash in on his daughter’s success. Mitch Winehouse and Amy’s surviving family members apparently provided advice to the filmmakers Back to black, so it’s no surprise that Eddie Marsan’s version of cab driver Mitch is more sympathetic — even if he doesn’t succumb, at a crucial moment, to pressure from Amy’s distraught boss (Sam Buchanan) to convince her to go to rehab. And get the help she clearly needs most. (Sorry, but no, no, no — that doesn’t sound like good parenting.)

Likewise, Blake Fielder-Civil, Winehouse’s husband, muse and subject of her addictive obsessions, gets a bit of reputation rehabilitation here too thanks to a wholly sympathetic portrait from the script and Jack O’Connell’s charismatic performance. What ends up being described by Blake in the film as “toxic codependency” is also a proper love story, a relationship built as much on Amy and Blake’s worst instincts as it is on their nuanced feelings. He gets credit, at least, for introducing Amy to the glorious wall of sound that is the “leader of the pack” at Shangri-Las, with whom he sweetly lip-syncs in one of their first flirtations. Scenes in a gloomy Camden pub.

Abella and O’Connell’s fissile chemistry together is a reminder that despite the cliche Fifty Shades of GreyThrough soft porn, Taylor-Johnson has a knack for evoking sexual longing – especially those in which women look at men, a theme she often explored in her photography and video work in the days when she was best known as a visual and contemporary artist. Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili and Tracey Emin.

In some ways, the drawbacks are in Back to black The weaknesses of her art are similar to those of the late 1990s and early 2000s: a certain superficial interest in superficiality, an obsession with name and fame that lacks insight, and a visceral approach to video narrative. At the end of the Back to black, we’ve watched Amy rise to fame, fall in love, have her heart broken, and die, but we never know what makes her tick. There’s a lot of focus on her familial relationships, not only with Mitch and her mother (Juliet Cowan), who barely appears, but also with her grandmother, Cynthia (Lesley Manville, who is moving). But the film doesn’t address how this seemingly happy Jewish family in north London singing Yiddish songs around the piano may have shaped Amy in any way apart from instilling a love of music and getting her into performing arts school.

Her talent, her determination, her beauty, and her anger are as inexplicable as the song the canary sings that she inherited from Cynthia. But that’s what biopics are – they always leave you wanting more.