But it transcends the usual rise-and-fall structure of conventional nonfiction biopics. Meticulously composed of present-day interviews and splendidly curated archival footage – Winehouse’s reaction to being compared to Dido in an early interview is priceless – “Amy” rescues Winehouse’s reputation, restoring her to her rightful place as a jazz interpreter on a par with Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan and Tony Bennett, whom she idolized. Their union would coincide with the most disastrously self-destructive chapter in Winehouse’s life. Just as vividly, he injects a note of doom when Winehouse meets her future husband and fellow addict, Blake Fielder-Civil. Kapadia, who directed the spellbinding 2010 car-racing documentary “Senna,” methodically takes viewers through the promising trajectory of Winehouse’s early career – publishing deals and label signings – immersing them in the vicarious thrill of discovery, artistic exploration and sudden, incandescent fame. A later rendition of “Moon River” is just as precociously scorching.
#AMY WINEHOUSE SIGNATURE SONG MOVIE#
“Amy” begins with a transfixing scene, a home movie in which a 14-year-old Winehouse sings “Happy Birthday” with the unforced confidence of a natural torch singer. Rather, it interrogates them, allowing Winehouse to come into her own as a gifted, conflicted, self-destructive but deeply resilient young woman who died far too soon. “Amy,” Asif Kapadia’s sensitive, superbly constructed, ultimately shattering documentary about Winehouse’s life and career, doesn’t traffic in the clichés of demons and trainwrecks. As most people familiar with her signature beehive hairstyle and dramatic cat-eye makeup know, Winehouse, who died in 2011 of alcohol poisoning, was the poster girl for the tabloid-driven culture of mass schadenfreude that was at its most gleefully vicious in the mid-aughts, pointing and laughing at a string of young women – Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus – before spitting them out in favor of the next horror show. Here’s another convenient buzzword: trainwreck. Superbly gifted, the singer also publicly grappled with addiction to alcohol and heroin, a battle with demons that seems part and parcel of many doomed creative lives, from Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix to Kurt Cobain. It’s all too easy to revert to familiar rhetoric when the subject is Amy Winehouse.
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