Back to Black does Amy Winehouse dirty.

The soul singer deserves her big screen moment – but not like this.

In 2016, in the middle of a flight to Los Angeles, with the lights dimmed and most of the rest of the plane asleep, I sat quietly in my chair, wide awake. And I sobbed.

The reason? I’d cued up Amy, the brilliant-but-brutally-bleak 2016 documentary about the glamorous life and tragic death of UK soul singer Amy Winehouse.

Asif Kapadia’s documentary is raw, unfiltered and unflinching. It lays the blame for the death of Winehouse – by alcohol poisoning, at the age of 27 – at the feet of those around her.

That means her on-again off-again husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced Winehouse to class A drugs, often fought physically with her, and provided the inspiration for her globe-conquering 2006 album, Back to Black, by leaving her and reuniting with his ex.

That also means her father, Mitch Winehouse, a London taxi driver accused of pushing his daughter to keep touring, to keep earning money, even when she clearly needed to stop and get help. He’s denied this, and threatened to sue.

(I’d place Amy among the most disturbing films I’ve seen so, please, look after yourself if you plan on watching it anytime soon. It’s available for rent on Apple TV+ for $5.99.)

If you’re heading out to theatres this weekend, you can choose to have a completely different experience with the Amy Winehouse story.

Back to Black, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s new drama with Marisa Abela encapsulating Winehouse, will not leave you in tears. Instead, it might leave you scratching your head, wondering what the fuck anyone involved in making this was thinking.

It cherry-picks moments from Winehouse’s life at random: a Grammys performance here, a drunken night out there, a fight with her dad here, a snippet of recording Back to Black there, leaving viewers with an unfulfilling story that veers all over the place.

It desperately tries to cover everything, yet manages to say nothing at all. So much is left untouched. Worse, so much is covered only in passing. Winehouse’s battle with bulimia is mentioned, briefly. Her struggle with drugs and alcohol is raised, occasionally. Fielder-Civil comes across as a lovable rascal. Her dad looks like a saint.

It is a mess of a movie, only occasionally flirting with the truth. Instead, Back to Black takes the bare bones of the story and turns it into a relationship drama, one that has Winehouse desperately staring at negative pregnancy tests while shaking her head, or sitting in a gutter staring at a lone fox walking through the park.

None of this is Abela’s fault. The Industry star – a class act, always – imbodies Winehouse brilliantly, from the cheeky innocence of her early years to her scrawny portrayal as a tragic tabloid figure. Abela is 27 too, and I can only imagine the stress she felt in getting this right. She did. She nailed it.

So it’s a shame Taylor-Johnson didn’t give Abela a movie worthy of her performance. I watched this in a cinema with no one else there. Afterwards, I sat there as the credits rolled, feeling like some kind of crime against truth had been committed, against reality, against portraying the real Amy Winehouse.

As Laura Snapes points out in her excellent review for The Guardian, Back to Black shows Winehouse as a woman who craved the quiet life, to become a wife, to have kids, “centering the idea that she was desperate to have a baby and that her inability to conceive was what killed her”.

Anyone who’s seen Amy knows the truth is far more complex, her downfall having as much to do with those in her inner circle as it did with her internal struggles. It’s a shame Abela didn’t get to portray that Winehouse. We would have had a real show on our hands.

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