“Again to Black,” the 2006 album that the model new Amy Winehouse biopic can take its title from, is a file produced on an gorgeous contradiction. The new music has a crispy scrumptious retro-bop bounce, a substantial excellent that extends to Winehouse’s vocals, which get the growling-cat stylings of jazz legends like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Family vacation and kick them up into a person matter playfully ferocious. But as soon as you tune into the lyrics, they are as darkish as midnight. “Rehab,” the album’s showpiece keep an eye on, really should completely be the jauntiest observe at any time recorded about an addict who turns the refusal to assist herself right into a stance of rock ‘n’ roll defiance.

At its best, “Again to Black,” the forthright and powerful new movie which is been created from Winehouse’s lifestyle, will take that light/darkish security and digs into the drama of it, making it sing. The movie’s snaky on-and-off power begins with the British actor Marisa Abela, whose guide efficiency nails Amy Winehouse in each appear, mood, utterance, and musical expression. At any time for the explanation that trailers and clips from this film dropped a amount of months in the previous, there was a pile-on of Web sniping in regards to the perceived wrongness of the casting. So let me say for the file: That is just nuts. Abela’s Amy is an real tension of mother nature, and every inch the Winehouse we all know from her ecstatic, tormented, spilling-over-the-sides, saturation-protection-by-the-media image — and from the fantastic Oscar-winning documentary “Amy” (2015), which kicked off the Winehouse renaissance that this movie is the stop outcome of.

We meet Amy in her comparatively effectively mannered and decorous youth, when she’s acquired a pierced bigger lip however earlier than she’s learned her trademark appear (winged mascara, over-the-leading beehive). A Jewish teenager from the Camden district of London, she’s focused to her Nan Cynthia (Lesley Manville), a previous ’50s nightclub singer from whom she’ll in the conclude increase that poufy interval hairdo. But Amy is not any further a “good Jewish lady” than Lenny Bruce was the male design of identical. From the starting, she has an insolent, jutting-toothed, sensually hungry, the-lady-cannot-enable-it grin that expresses her uncooked urge for food stuff for all periods, in addition to a difficult doing work-class accent (“collectively” comes out as “togevuh”) that alerts she’s not getting any prisoners.

The movie opens in 2002, when she’s by now an up-and-coming sensation in the London nightclub scene. At a get-with each other of relations inside the home of her doting father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan) — her mother and father are divided, and Amy however life in a tiny mattress place in just the home of her troubled mother — Amy and Mitch workforce up for a dwelling-home duet on “Fly Me to the Moon,” and we see the unironic virtuosity which is her flooring floor as a singer.

Having said that the edge is there far too. In an episode that provokes a chuckle, but on top of that implies the dearth of boundaries that fuels her artwork, Amy draws in the curiosity of Nick Shymansky (Sam Buchanan), a doable supervisor, when she performs “Stronger Than Me,” a observe that principally disses her boyfriend as an emasculated wimp (inside of the preliminary assembly with Nick, the boyfriend learns that he’s the dupe of the keep track of and stalks out). Amy, at a person degree, says that she’s not a feminist as a outcome of she likes boys an excessive amount of. Having said that the truth is she’s the incarnation of a brand new design of womanly assertion, like Courtney Adore reborn as a proudly dissolute jazz diva who has occur by indicates of the trying glass of hip-hop. The evaluate of her feminism is that she does no make any difference she dreams she’s drawn to extremes of hedonistic self-expression, whether or not or not it is how a lot she beverages, the tattoos she will get on a whim (a great deal a lot more of a novelty and a push release 20 years in the previous), or the fearless emulation of her jazz heroines. “I’m no fuckin’ Spice Girl,” she tells Nick. That would surface apparent, though it’s a lesson she’s going to preserve proving even when it kills her.

Amy facts her first album, “Frank” (2003), as a knowingly out-of-time jazz file. She retains declaring that she doesn’t treatment about money. The album is acknowledged as right after her idol, Frank Sinatra (although the motion picture by no usually means clues us into that), which indicates that she wishes to do it her fashion. Having said that that’s easier described than accomplished when you have climbed onto the history-marketplace ladder. She fulfills with the executives, who’ve just a handful of concepts largely centered on the real truth that the album was not quite industrial. They’d to some degree not start it inside of the U.S. (they would like to search forward to her stick to-up album). They suppose she should to stop taking part in the guitar onstage. Amy’s reaction to all that is to inform them to fuck by themselves, and to say: I must dwell to compose down tracks, so I’m likely to get a substantial crack earlier than I make my subsequent album.

What dwelling appears to be is falling for the individual who’ll be the adore of her daily life, as a end result of he’s as billed an addict as she is. The extended sequence via which Amy meets the appealing, indomitable Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) at a pub is a bravura piece of mutual seduction via which the movie’s director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, reveals off her chops. Blake will not be an emasculated wimp his self-assurance is complete, his suavity bordering on the toxic. Jack O’Connell performs him as a type of throwback — he’s like a late-’60s British matinee idol (assume James Fox or the Michael Caine of “Alfie”) having part in a jock with a lightning intellect. He is informed of Amy’s file by coronary heart he moreover introduces her, on the jukebox, to the Shangri-Las’ “Chief of the Pack,” lip-syncing to it with gender-blending glee.

However proper here’s the location the film begins to beckon us onto a to some degree forbidding check. These two are smitten, fused by an addictive narcissism that does not simply operate to sloshed flirting inside of the pub. Blake is into cocaine (and later on, we analyze, heroin). When he leaves a gig of Amy’s in the midst of a keep track of, all as a end result of he’d rather do medication than hearken to her, she comes out into the street and ultimately ends up assaulting him. These two have an intense chemistry, on the other hand they’re breaking aside earlier than they are acquiring commenced.

She spins the album “Again to Black” out of how shattered he remaining her. And it is an indicator of the place the movie’s priorities lie that we see her recording the irresistibly heartbreak-hooked title keep an eye on, but there’s tiny to no sense of how Winehouse’s masterful second and last album was made (the producer Mark Ronson will get a name-drop, the producer Salaam Remi will get a photograph drop, and that is all). The album is a huge strike, producing Amy a star stalked by the paparazzi. And Blake will take the album’s message of melancholy as a signal that she’ll just take him once more. So he phone calls her, and so they get married (principally a Vegas marriage ceremony in Miami Seaside), after which they’re breaking apart once more.

“Sid and Nancy,” I’m frightened, this is not. We never swoon more than the dysfunctional passion, the spectacle of two lovelorn addicts who’re destined to produce out the worst in one one more. But with out that burning passionate main, “Again to Black” performs out what appears like an legitimate having said that considerably scientific model of amour fou.

What in regards to the songs we enjoy from “Black to Black”? Abela’s in-concert renditions of a quantity of Winehouse classics have a dilapidated splendor, and her effectiveness of “Rehab” on the 2008 Grammy Awards is perfection. The actor did all her particular singing she will get each and every hovering and scat-souled nuance. The songs are all in there, having said that not in a way that feels, at each and every next, like they are expressing one detail so emotionally required that it turns into cathartic. Amy, opposite to her mythology, does obtain by yourself in rehab. Shut to the suggestion of her everyday living, she will get clear, as Janis Joplin did. Having said that that is not enough to preserve her from transforming into a member of the cautionary membership of pop stars who died at 27 (Janis, Jimi, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain). Her self-destruction is on full demonstrate in “Again to Black.” But the movie provides it, even revels in it, with out supplying you with the feeling that it thoroughly understands it.