Amy Winehouse documentary wins raves but angers family

Long-time fans of Amy will appreciate previously unheard tracks and unseen footage featured in the film, while casual admirers will have an inside look at her struggle with addiction and stardom. Mitch does, indeed, advise her against rehab, and if daddy says I’m fine. “I said: ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves”.

“I tried to sabotage myself and she tried to sabotage herself”.

“By the time she became famous, particularly in the USA and Canada-you guys got her a bit later than we did-she’d closed down”, the London-based filmmaker says. “How can you say that?” (The so-called 27 Club includes Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.). Director Asif Kapadia (Senna) opens his film not with a montage of talking heads spouting money quotes about Amy Winehouse, but with a home movie of teenage Winehouse hanging out with friends for someone’s birthday. Kapadia’s film may be simply titled Amy but it does come with the telling tagline, “the girl behind the name”. Teenagers Kyoko and Kaito (Jun Yoshinaga, Nijiro Murakami), their friendship turning to something more, have their own concerns but they too soon find themselves caught up in the tumult. He’s also not afraid to examine the details which lead to her demise with stern focus and concentrated attention, rarely sugarcoating the problems in her life and those directly, and indirectly, responsible.

Her father Mitch Winehouse told Sky News the film was “incredibly misleading”, claiming the footage was edited to imply that he could have done more to save his troubled daughter.

While her own lyrics help carry the narrative of the story, several never-before-seen live renditions bring new depth to the songs we already know by heart.

A statue of the singer, with her trademark beehive hair, was unveiled there past year. Reading them on screen, though, one is also struck by how inward her gaze was, how repetitive her references-to love and lost love, to pain, to bleak fate.

Fittingly for someone a friend calls “a very old soul in a very young body”, Winehouse always gravitated toward jazz, idolizing such singers as Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. They were specifically annoyed with the movie’s assertion that they somehow abandoned Amy in her hour of need. “So leave me alone to do that”. Perhaps this is only because Ayrton meant nothing to me personally, whereas I was mad for Winehouse from the moment I first heard her, which, you will not be surprised to hear, was way after everyone else.

For Winehouse’s experiences were often bleak.

Mitch Winehouse has said he was not happy with the way the filmmakers had portrayed him and that they had missed details such as an interview the singer’s boyfriend, Reg Traviss.

As Winehouse’s life spirals toward oblivion, two major negative forces make their presence felt, starting with the virulent, corrosive nature of the tabloid media that hounded her mercilessly and eventually ate her alive.

Kapadia has gotten everyone close to Winehouse to speak, and the interviews are more personal having been taped off-camera. It shows with pitiless clarity how Amy Winehouse was approaching a fate that everyone could see and no one could do anything about.