It’s a grotesque insult for Back to Black to suggest Amy Winehouse died of heartache over her childlessness

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic suggests that the singer’s desire for a baby was the main source of her suffering. It’s a gendered simplification that exonerates the forces that killed her

• This article contains spoilers for Back to Black

Anyone who saw Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy is well aware of the injustices faced by Amy Winehouse during her 27 years of life. She endured addiction to alcohol and drugs, as well as bulimia, depression and self-harm. In Blake Fielder-Civil, she married a fame-hungry leech who has said he got her into crack and heroin. (“Of course I regret it,” he later said.) Her father, Mitch Winehouse, is depicted (in a portrayal he disputes) as absent until she finds success; as the song goes, he agreed with his daughter that she didn’t need to go to rehab when her first manager, Nick Shymansky, stressed that she definitely did, and trailed her with a camera crew when she was finding calm away from the UK’s vicious tabloid media in St Lucia. The film suggests that promoter turned manager Raye Cosbert put a barely conscious Winehouse on a plane taking her to her disastrous final date in Belgrade in June 2011, a month prior to her death from alcohol poisoning. Of course, the humiliations of that performance and many others like it were hers alone to weather.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s shallow new biopic, Back to Black, is the latest injustice meted out to Winehouse. It is a regressive retreat to damaging tropes with a focus on her self-destruction that handily exonerates everyone surrounding her – bar the convenient bogeymen of swarming paparazzi and Clueless Men From The Record Label Telling Her What To Do, who the director can count on any faintly Britney-literate viewer to understand as The Bad Guys – and it undoes much of the work done to establish a fair and de-sensationalised understanding of the singer since her death. It is voyeuristic about her pain, revelling in actor Marisa Abela’s shocking thinness and scenes of her stumbling through Camden with those grimly famous bloodied ballet pumps, with portentous attempts at symbolism – what could this caged songbird mean?! How about this fox she sees while crying on the pavement?! – yet makes no authentic attempt to understand where that pain stemmed from.

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