'Back to Black': You'll Die a Hundred Times

It’s hard to gauge how bad a film people thought Back to Black was when it was released in Britain last month. The slightly dreaded biopic about the tragically short career of homegrown music sensation Amy Winehouse held at number one at the UK box office for two weeks, only dropping to number two upon the insistence of sexy tennis drama Challengers and for all the intense reactions to promotional clips and fears that it would be a damaging and inappropriate disaster, not much fuss has been kicked up domestically.

Reviews have been mixed; some columnists have stressed polarized takes, but audiences have turned up and taken the handsome sentimentality at face value like any other music biopic of a beloved star. This may be the true insidiousness of Back to Black, a terrible film that offers nothing inventive on the tired music biopic formula and inadvertently reveals how harmful a movie like this is, even without it being an overt car crash.

Teenage Amy Winehouse (Industry’s Marisa Abela) comes from an average London Jewish family on the verge of stardom for her incredible contralto voice and sparky, deeply-felt songwriting. Her dad Mitch (Eddie Marsen) is a taxi driver who’s fated to be entirely out of his depth in the music industry; her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville) used to date British jazz musician Ronnie Scott and delights Amy with her many showbiz tales.