Amy

There is something a little bit ghoulish about a film like Asif Kapadia’s Amy, though that is part and parcel of every show-biz biopic since they switched from sanitized to salacious in the 1950s with tabloidesque tell-all films like Lillian Roth’s I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955) and Diana Barrymore’s Too Much, Too Soon (1958). The difference with Amy is that you’re watching the real Amy Winehouse destruct through archival footage and a mind-boggling amount of home video self-documentation. (It almost feels like she — and her friends — were laying out the template for this film.) Since you know where this is leading, there’s a grim inevitability to it all. And the fact that Kapadia keeps the image on Winehouse — there are interviews, but all in voice-over, with no talking heads — can make the grimness pretty uncomfortable.

I should note that I came to Amy with only the vaguest notion of Amy Winehouse. I hadn’t followed her career; so far as I know, I’d never heard her sing. She was someone I caught glimpses of on the news — someone who became a walking punchline for topical comics. Just about everything I know about her comes from this long (128 minutes) documentary. What I came away with is that she was a unique talent — especially in an age where female vocalists tend to be auto-tuned and otherwise processed into all sounding the same. She wrote confessional songs — not always with the best lyrics (this is someone who rhymed “again” with “reunion” by torturing the second word to fit) — that in hindsight conveyed great pain and confusion, sometimes (as in “Rehab”) masked under a jaunty and defiant tune.

Was she a genius? Maybe. I don’t know. I mostly felt like I was watching was confused and frightened kid, trying — unsuccessfully — to deal with personal demons (bulimia, substance abuse, abandonment issues) while living in a fishbowl of paparazzi and the glare of the public eye. Nowhere is this childlike quality more apparent than in the film’s most poignant and emotionally powerful scene, where she’s onstage watching herself win a Grammy on a monitor. Her level of surprise and joy at this is heartbreaking in its simplicity — and in what it conveys about how ill-equipped she was to deal with this. For a moment, the excesses and the bad decisions melt away, but it’s only a moment and we know it. The fact that the award is presented by one of her idols, Tony Bennett, makes it even more bittersweet, especially in conjunction with a late-in-the-day recording session (where she is not at her best) in duet with Bennett.

Oh, sure, Winehouse had lots of help in not making it. Some of it — especially that of her later management, her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil and her father Mitch (who has unsurprisingly distanced himself from the film) — comes across as at best venal, and at worst deliberate. But just as much seems born of a sense of helplessness and a large degree of naiveté on the part of her supporters, who mistake “rehab” for a cure and “clean” for a permanent situation. Of course, neither is true — as anyone who’s ever dealt with an alcoholic or an addict knows too well. Even when someone opines that rehab sometimes takes “two or three” tries, it’s putting a simplistic take on the situation. But the film isn’t out to find the culprits. It’s out to paint a human portrait of a tragedy in an often uncomfortable manner that lets no one — not even Amy Winehouse, the viewer or the filmmaker — quite off the hook. It’s strong stuff, but definitely worth a look. Rated R for language and drug material.