Film Review: Back to Black focuses more on Amy Winehouse’s personal life than it does on her music

Marisa Abela stars as Amy Winehouse in Sam Taylor-Johnson's Back to Black

• Back to Black 
• ★★★★☆
• Cinema release

Just ‘an old-school girl’ is how Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) describes herself during Back to Black (15A) as she explains her idiosyncratic fashion choices to her boyfriend Blake (Jack O’Connell), a style — the trademark beehive included — that was heavily influenced by her beloved Nan, Cynthia (Lesley Manville).

Indeed, the film opens with Amy’s extended family at home and belting out classics around a piano in a scene that could have been plucked from the 1950s — everyone is having a tipple, of course, and then the teenage Amy steps forward and dazzles them all with her unique voice.

But Amy is a very modern young woman, and lives life to the full in 1990s Camden Town: when she meets the charismatic Blake Fielder-Civil, with his fondness for Class A drugs, Amy has already developed a fearsome capacity for self-destructive behaviour.

Written by Matt Greenhalgh and directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, Back to Black is a biopic that focuses more on Amy Winehouse’s personal life than it does on her music: we see very little of the artist’s creative process, and only occasionally get to see her onstage (when Marisa Abela offers a perfectly adequate cover of that distinctive voice).

That might be disappointing for dedicated fans, but this film works due to the power of the two leads as they navigate their tempestuous relationship: Abela is by turns spiky, tender, uncompromising, and vulnerable, while Jack O’Connell is magnetic as the Cockney wide-boy oozing superficial charm.