When Jake Kasdan and John C. Reilly satirized the glossy music biopic in 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the tropes of the genre were more or less calcified: the hardscrabble childhood, the meteoric rise to stardom, the struggles with substance abuse, the heroic redemption and/or tragic demise. By the time “Weird Al” Yankovic crafted his own parodic auto-biopic fifteen years later with 2022’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, those conventions had remained unchanged. The music biopic occupies a peculiar place in the cinematic landscape: they’re usually corny and formulaic, and everybody knows they’re corny and formulaic, yet they almost invariably make boatloads of money and rake in award nominations anyway. What’s more, they’ve become a crucial step in the canonization of rock ‘n’ roll deities: have you really made it as a musician if you haven’t been played in a schmaltzy docudrama by an Oscar-hopeful in a fake nose?
The latest recipient of this cinematic beatification is Amy Winehouse, the ill-starred British chanteuse whose signature album, Back to Black, was still rising on the US charts when Walk Hard was released in theaters. As 21st-century pop stars go, Winehouse is certainly one of the clearest candidates for the treatment: Back to Black was one of those records which fundamentally tilted the axis of pop music history, and her downfall was as tragically romantic as any member of rock’s hallowed “27 Club.” But Amy’s biopic, also titled Back to Black, challenges neither our perceptions of its subject nor the conventions of its genre, and is ultimately barely less tawdry than the paparazzi that hounded her to her grave.
Back to Black follows the authorized-biopic formula every bit as devotedly as Weird. The hardscrabble childhood is here set in working class London, as teenaged Amy (Marisa Abela, last seen as Teen Talk Barbie) is raised by her musically inclined father and grandmother (Eddie Marsan and Lesley Manville). The rise to stardom, of course, is anchored on the album of the title, whose undeniably seductive retro-grooves helped wean us off the plastic-fantastic pop of the Bush-Blair years. And, of course, there’s the downfall, which checks pretty much all the boxes: alcoholism, bulimia, a tempestuous and codependent relationship with on-again-off-again husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), and, of course, that final comedown. At the risk of spoiling the ending for anyone who wasn’t around in 2011, we never did get that follow-up album.
A fun game to play while watching an authorized biopic is trying to guess which of the characters portrayed onscreen holds the rights to the subject’s estate in real life. Anyone watching Back to Black probably won’t need to check Wikipedia to discern that the Winehouse estate is controlled by the singer’s father. Marsan plays the elder Winehouse as a bastion of fatherly pride, beaming as he tells the fares in his cab “‘At’s my daughter!” In fact, Mitch Winehouse was and is a controversial figure, accused of tipping photographers off to his daughter’s whereabouts and using her death to further his own career. The one thing that anyone who knows anything about Amy knows about Mitch is that he once declared it “fine” for her not to go to rehab. That incident is dramatized here, of course, but it’s rather unbelievably spun as a supportive father sticking up for his daughter in the face of a controlling manager. Even more bizarrely, when it finally comes time for Amy to sing “Rehab” in the film, it’s nonsensically played as a victory lap after she does go to rehab. When she sings the line about her daddy, it cuts to Mitch chuckling, as if it were a little inside joke between the two. It may have been, for all I know, but it can’t help but feel a little ghastly given what we know has to happen a few years later, and smacks of self-absolution on Mitch’s part.
Of course, the main selling point of an authorized biopic is that it gets to use the artist’s actual music, and here the film does briefly shine. Winehouse’s music, and the Back to Black album in particular, are naturally cinematic: between Mark Ronson’s wall-of-soundalike production, the sultry groove of supporting band the Dap-Kings, and, of course, that bolt-from-the-heavens voice. When Back to Black pauses the machinations of the plot and allows the music to take center stage, the results can be thrilling. A wordless montage set to the title track, in which Winehouse travels to New York for a recording session while pining for her ex, is quite effective, conveying the story in music and images far more effectively than words ever could. One could probably take this approach for the entire story and come out with a pretty solid sung-through jukebox musical.
Pity, then, about the dialogue. A good biopic can make us feel closer emotionally to its subject, but Back to Black is so by-the-numbers that it has a distancing effect, like a wax museum come to life. Winehouse’s life and death are still recent enough that it’s difficult to shed much more light on them; we remember all the major points, and not much new information is introduced. Worse, the dramatics hew so closely to hoary Hollywood melodrama that they often feel regressive. Much of Winehouse’s arc is pinned on her pining love for Fielding-Civil (who also gets off pretty easy, all told). It’s also implied that her depression was rooted in her yearning to have a baby, a device which comes off as cheap and reductive as when it was trotted out in Blonde (disappointingly, there’s no talking fetus in this one). “I ain’t no Spice Girl,” Winehouse sneers to a would-be agent, but that’s about as far as the film’s feminism goes.
It’s not impossible to make a great music biopic, of course. There’s Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy, which elevates the punk rock tragedy of Sid Vicious to operatic psychedelia; the not-Kurt of Last Days and the not-Courtney of Her Smell, which grant the freedom to explore their subjects in a way no “official” version could; Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, which brilliantly solves the conundrum of Bob Dylan’s career by splintering it into six separate narratives. These are all real movies, whose filmmakers shed fresh and exciting perspectives on their subjects’ life stories. The continuing wave of officially licensed biopics, on the other hand, are something more akin to the faux-weathered band shirts in the youth section at Target: easily digestible merch, trapping messy lives in amber to be packaged and sold as a label-approved “official version.” Amy Winehouse was a musical force of nature, and her tragedy was and is an inextricable part of her legend. But it doesn’t need to be gussied up in a big, glossy biopic– all of that is right there on the record she put her heart into, ready to be played again and again.
Back to Black
2024
dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson
122 min.
Opens Friday, 5/17 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre and theaters everywhere
