Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ was cry for help: Asif Kapadia

Mitch Winehouse has revealed that he is making his own documentary film about his daughter Amy Winehouse’s life. Black-and-white villains rarely suit such tragic stories. “I’d probably go mad”.

All these juicy details make up for a melodramatic documentary of a young musician who died at the age of twenty-seven, from alcohol poisoning.

Amy, the acclaimed film about the late Amy Winehouse, has broken a United Kingdom box office record over its opening weekend. You had people who had praised her and now they were murdering her. Hopefully, when they see their faces on the screen they’ll feel embarrassed. They always sounded poignant; doubly so now. Kapadia – whose last film was the 2010 documentary Senna, about Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna – knows he can’t rewrite Winehouse’s history, as much as he may wish he could. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the film but didn’t make the final cut.).

In Amy, a friend says Amy worshipped the ground her father walked on. But I wouldn’t have considered myself an expert on either. “Before I thought she may have been a bit of an attention seeker, but now I don’t think she was at all“. She sang in the song Rehab: “I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine…”

But this film goes far beyond Winehouse’s relationship with her father, offering a harrowing account of contemporary celebrity culture. In the Guardian, he said that, the first time he saw the finished movie, he told the filmmakers, “You should be ashamed of yourselves”.

Kapadia was studying graphic design when he got a job as a gopher on a movie. I don’t have an agenda. And then you realize, ‘Oh my god, that’s a kid. “Amy was very honest, very straightforward”. I don’t know anything about this story. “I didn’t know if it was going to work”. Childhood friends of Winehouse and first manager Nick Shymansky opened up to him.

“We did a lot of research”. It’s a question the makers of Magic Mike XXL spend two hours trying but failing to figure out.

“She’s amusing!” director Asif Kapadia gushed in an interview with ETonline.

Speaking to Sky News, he said: “It’s incredibly misleading and it’s unfair because we spent our whole time when necessary cajoling Amy into rehab, into detox, and into getting help for her mental situation”.

What we get is a rambling, shapeless and drama-free road movie in which original star Channing Tatum (Magic Mike) rejoins his pumped-up posse having made a mess of the personal life he had so assiduously repaired in the 2012 original. But we’re reminded that her mother wasn’t strong enough to rein her in as a teenager either. “People lose things”, the director says. But others were fans of hers until her dying day, and still others watched her antics as if they were driving past a horrific accident. “It’s not physical”.

Despite the Winehouse family’s disapproval, fans will likely cherish the film for its look at the singer’s vulnerable private side – and for its reminder of her talent. Winehouse was already being treated for bulimia and depression in her teens, possibly because of her father’s departure to live with another woman. We as viewers aren’t let off the hook, either, especially if we ever laughed at a late-night host’s crack about Winehouse or casually dismissed her as a “trainwreck”.

There has been some controversy over how certain people are depicted, though I’d challenge any of the participants to quibble when their own words and actions are pretty damning.