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Documentary 'Amy' charts the rise and demise of Amy Winehouse

Director Asif Kapadia's gripping documentary Amy, about the short life of troubled British R&B-soul singer Amy Winehouse, caused a buzz and kicked up a controversy when it premiered this spring at the Cannes Film Festival. It tells a sad, tragic story.

"Amy," a documentary about British soul singer Amy Winehouse - her life, her career, her addictions, her death - opens in theaters this month.
"Amy," a documentary about British soul singer Amy Winehouse - her life, her career, her addictions, her death - opens in theaters this month.Read moreA24 Films

Director Asif Kapadia's gripping documentary Amy, about the short life of troubled British R&B-soul singer Amy Winehouse, caused a buzz and kicked up a controversy when it premiered this spring at the Cannes Film Festival. It tells a sad, tragic story.

You know how it ends. Amy is the second of a pair of sterling 2015 music docs - along with Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain tearjerker Montage of Heck - that track the rise and demise of seriously talented and ill-fated pop stars who died early deaths, in Winehouse's case from "alcohol toxicity" in 2011.

Like Montage, Kapadia's film, which opens at area theaters on Friday, benefits from a remarkable trove of previously unseen material. His creative team gained the trust of many of Winehouse's close friends and associates, who gave them access. Home movies, cellphone videos, and an abundance of performance footage deliver an intimate and ultimately heartbreaking portrait of Winehouse as an artist swallowed up by fame, her humanity disregarded as her life became fodder for the celebrity-obsessed entertainment industry.

We see this brilliant talent as a precocious, playful jazz singer growing up in working-class north London, raised by a mother who conceded that she didn't know how to discipline her daughter and a father who calls himself "a coward" because, although he began an extramarital affair when his daughter was 21/2, he didn't split up with her mother until she was 9.

Amy is a vivid documentary for these digital times. When the everyday details of life are not recorded by paparazzi or professional cameramen, they're caught for posterity by Winehouse and friends, always with a video camera at the ready.

It's all employed masterfully by Kapadia, the director of the terrific 2010 Formula One racing documentary Senna, about Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna. Kapadia brings Winehouse back to life as a fully realized, deeply flawed human being.

In a phone interview last month, Kapadia - on a promo tour whisking him from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York in three days - said that when he came to the project, he was only a casual fan.

Kapadia, 43, says he "knew about" both Senna and Winehouse: "I used to watch car racing, and I had Amy's records. But I wouldn't have considered myself an expert on either. I'm not really interested in making films about things I know a lot about. I like the idea of being a bit of an outsider and learning along the way."

Moviegoers will not leave Amy dry-eyed, as they watch Winehouse's neediness and vulnerability grow. Nervous and unsteady, she clings to figures like her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, as she strikes red-carpet poses for insatiable photographers.

We see her transformed from a sweet, healthy-seeming teenager who hasn't lost her baby fat to a scary-thin, beehived style icon whose bulimia became apparent to record-label execs on the same day she recorded the devastating girl-group blues "You Know That I'm No Good": "I cheated myself, like I knew I would/ I told you I was trouble, you know that I'm no good."

The film doesn't point fingers directly, but manager Raye Cosbert, Fielder-Civil, and father Mitch Winehouse come off as bad guys who fail to protect her and who profit from her success.

Mitch Winehouse - quite literally the Daddy who "thinks I'm fine" in "Rehab," the lead single from Back to Black, the 2006 masterpiece of self-doubt and recrimination that made Winehouse a star - has protested his portrayal. The former cabdriver who sang Frank Sinatra songs to Amy when she was a child and released his own album of swing classics in 2011, is most damningly shown visiting his daughter on a Caribbean island where she has gone to escape the media - and turning up with a camera crew in tow.

Mitch Winehouse has called the film "horrible." In the Guardian, he said that, the first time he saw the finished movie, he told the filmmakers, "You should be ashamed of yourselves. You had the opportunity to make a wonderful film, and you've made this."

"It's very complicated because these are real people," Kapadia says. "And I interviewed all of them, over a hundred people. I met every single person in her circle, because to me, the only way to really unravel what happened to her, and why, was to talk to everyone. I don't have an agenda.

"You start the film not knowing this material exists," the director recalls. "You don't know what the film is going to be. With Amy, there were a lot of performances, and a lot of them were not very good. But there was very little personal stuff. I didn't know if there was a movie there. I didn't know if it was going to work."

It did, because along with the villains in Amy, there are heroes, such a songwriter Salaam Remi, as well as childhood friend Juliette Ashby and, in particular, first manager Nick Shymansky. He thought it was too soon after Winehouse's death to make a movie, but was willing to meet with the director because he was a fan of Senna.

"Nick came in to the editing suite," Kapadia says, "and we had a lot of dates up on the wall, like in a cop movie. We were trying to figure out who did what when, and look at it visually. It was very quiet until Back to Black comes out and she becomes famous. But all of the interesting stuff has happened before then. So Nick looked at that and said it made a big difference because he saw that we had already done a lot of homework. He was the first person to talk to us and the first to give us the home movies."

Making a documentary in the era of digital narcissism has its upside, says Kapadia, but also has its problems. "People lose things," the director says. "The problem is that, nowadays, because it's all digital, they copy things from one computer to another, and it doesn't copy correctly. . . . There were a number of times where that happened, where we had something great, and we lost it. That's the downside. It's just a file with a number. It's not a photograph. It's not physical."

With a wealth of winning performance footage - as well as a fair share of disastrous clips, when she was in the full throes of addiction - Amy does a topflight job of conveying Winehouse's gift, as she updates jazz, R&B, and girl-group sass into a hip-hop-friendly blend that was an ideal vehicle for moody self-reflection. And as the director outlined her trajectory - from innocent teen to Grammy-winning star whom Tony Bennett would compare to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald shortly before her death - Kapadia could not help getting emotionally involved.

As the making of Amy progressed, he and his partners realized "we had to do justice to her because by then we all really liked her. And had all kind of fallen in love with her. With that real person, the real kid who's there at the beginning. People need to know who she really was and what she was really like and that she's not just that caricature that gets made fun of on late-night TV.

"That person is not really her."

MOVIE

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Amy

Opens Friday at the Ritz East.EndText

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