Amy - The Girl Behind the Name

"You should be tougher mum, you're not strong enough to say stop." Amy Winehouse

Don't we all wish this gifted British jazz singer had heeded her advice to her beloved mother? But she didn't and lost her young life to drugs, alcohol, relentless fame, and a father, husband, manager and a whole menagerie of hangers on, whose motives were suspicious at the least. Or, maybe I should say her father, Nick, is only the most obvious sinner as he gains a reality TV show and allows his daughter to perform even in the face of her decline.

Although Amy the documentary doesn't give anyone a pass, it does show Amy's slow descent into dependencies that can only in the end be characterized as her own. The strength of the doc, however, is not to blame everyone except by implication and their very words, some of which are voiced over rather than through boring talking heads.

The first half of the film is a glorious catalogue of her young days at home and then early on singing jazz. Her tight dresses and fab legs don't even distract when we watch the essence of soul emerge out of her voice and face. Even I, barely knowledgeable in the genre, could spy greatness in her every breath.

As if to remind us of her genius, she comes back from rehab to briefly exonerate herself by singing a duet with Tony Bennett. Her diffidence with that icon next to her is as endearing as it is appropriate, given his stature in the business and her relative inexperience. Yet, Bennett himself acknowledges her gifts and compares her to the greats like Ella Fitzgerald.

Amy is director Asif Kapadia's unforgettable achievement, one of the finest music documentaries ever. However, it is not an easy ride, especially when we can feel ever so slightly complicit as we contribute to the crushing adulation of celebrity and unvarnished love of capitalism. Some like Amy Winehouse need to back away from both before it kills them.

This is one of the best documentaries that I have seen because its not meant to be flashy and "entertaining". It is a very honest and emotional movie with personal clips that show her rise to fame and her feelings about it. One of the biggest reasons why I loved it was because all the different sides of her life were presented in the movie. I loved how all the opposing sides agreed to come together and make this amazing movie. Her parents, managers, ex husband were all included, even though they probably hate one another in real life. I also liked how they included full songs in the documentary. I was a big fan of Amy Winehouse before but this movie made me appreciate her personality and clever poetry. Highly recommended. trust.

I remember when Amy Winehouse died back in 2011 it had a certain inevitability about it yet was still shocking and very sad. The media had made a meal out of her problems documenting them at every given opportunity and her increasingly emancipated appearance was publicised for all to see, courtesy of the lowlifes of the paparazzi. Hers was life in a goldfish bowl by the end and for a person who never wanted fame in the first place; this made her life all the more difficult. What complicated matters so fatally was that in amongst all of this, she had a predisposition for drink and drugs. The combination sent her spiralling on a downward trajectory.

This documentary about her has been made by Asif Kapadia who directed the film Senna (2010) which remains one of the most highly respected documentaries of recent years. When you consider that that film was also about someone at the top of their field who died young in a dramatic and sudden manner, you could say that there are some similarities between both stories. But in reality the Amy Winehouse story is a much darker one, with its central character going on an extended path of self-destruction. And one in which we in the audience know only too well how it ends. The film is made up of home video and TV clips of Winehouse and fills in details with recollections of people who were close to her in the form of voice-overs, as opposed to a more traditional talking heads format. After the release of her definitive album Back to Black in 2006, Winehouse basically retreated and conducted next to no interviews which of course posed the film-makers some problems and the effect is that as the film goes on she becomes increasingly remote and we feel like we know her less.

The contrast between the Amy of the early years to the one latterly seen is pretty pronounced. Her appearance became more intense and she quickly covered herself with an assortment of harsh tattoos. This phase coincided with her downward spiral with drink and drugs. It seems pretty clear that her attachment to her husband Blake Fielder was inextricably linked to this. He came across as a hanger-on who led her onto hard drugs and who then had little self-interest in getting her off them. The problem was that she loved him and it was this that made the situation so destructive. Throughout the film, as her songs play, her lyrics are displayed on screen and it is obvious that much of her music was based on highly personal emotional songs that constantly were sourced from her experiences in relationships. So much of her success was derived from this well of emotion but it was one that could equally destabilise her. This was only exacerbated by her bouts of depression and her problematic relationship with her dad.

There is no getting away with the fact that this is a sad story; one that is all the more shaming when you consider that it played out so visibly in the public eye. But the public eye is very uncaring unfortunately and all too often empathises when it is far too late. But this film also captures the voice and the humour, so integral to Amy Winehouse. And so while it is impossible to ignore the tragedy, the beauty is here too. This was, after all, a very singular artist whose roots were in jazz, which is hardly a music for lightweights. Amy Winehouse was a proper talent who made music entirely on her own terms. If I was to criticise mildly it would be to say that the film itself might be marginally too long and perhaps goes over some ground more than it has to. But mainly this is ultimately a very worthy attempt to tell what is a complex and contrasting story to the screen with all its darkness and light.

A haunting, heartbreaking and stunningly brilliant film from Senna director Asif Kapadia, which takes us into the confidence of Amy Winehouse, as the bolshy, big-voiced, jazzy Jewish girl from North London becomes a megastar, while her personal demons, her relationship with a drug addict, and a ravenous, amoral press proceed to rip her to shreds.

Thanks to an abundance of revelatory home video footage, soundtracked by incisive interviews, we see her not only as the beehived, cat- eyed chanteuse or the alarmingly ribbed tabloid quarry, tumbling out of a club at 3am, but as a shy, spotty teen with a seductive offhand confidence in her vocal gift.

I'm not an enormous fan of Winehouse's music, I think because her deeply personal writing and distinctive, expressive voice tended to be masked by such contrived, Americanised pastiche – trading first on '30s jazz and then '60s girl groups – but the portrait that emerges here is uncompromising, thrilling and frequently devastating: of an unhappy girl equipped with a massive talent, but none of the stability or serenity to deal with the perpetual media storm that her success brought upon her.

We see stand-ups and TV presenters laughing at her bulimia and drug abuse, her management pushing her out of rehab and onto foreign stages, and – in the second half – a rapacious, vulturous paparazzi incessantly stalking her, an essential decency chillingly absent. If that was my job, I think I would struggle to watch this film and think: "Yes, what I am doing with my life is essentially fine."

By contrast, Kapadia's film is quite beautifully lacking in sensationalism. Though it essentially doubles an indictment of a society almost entirely lacking in basic compassion and empathy, it's a work that possesses both virtues in apparently limitless amounts, surely compressing and simplifying an impossibly complex narrative, but attaining something that seems awfully like the truth – and apparently is, according to her closest friends.

Amy is a tough watch, but it feels essential, not just for its vivid picture of a fascinating, deeply troubled young woman, but also for its wider significance: as a plea for people to stop being so horribly selfish, to stop seeing excess and illness as 'rock and roll' and drug abuse as a joke, and for the media to realise that if it wants to paint itself as a crusading Fifth Estate, then some basic humanity wouldn't go amiss.

Asif Kapadia's documentary tells a familiar tale of the life and death of Amy Winehouse - a precocious talent from North London with a unique vocal and songwriting talent destroyed by a combination of willful manipulation, drugs and drink. The same could also be said for other great jazz singers of the past, notably Billie Holiday (whose voice often seems eerily similar to Winehouse's).

With the help of childhood friends and archive interviews, Kapadia paints a picture of a Jewish girl growing up in an unstable household. Her father Mitch had an affair when Amy was still a baby, and finally left home when she was eight or nine. Her mother Janis admitted that she was really too weak to keep Amy under control: Amy grew up doing virtually what she wanted with little or no authority to restrain her.

By her teenage years it was clear that Amy had a unique talent for singing and writing songs reflecting her various angst. Signed to a contract by Island Records, she gradually rose to stardom, while keeping her feet on the ground; she was always someone most at home with writing and recording music. Video footage from the period shows her enjoying herself with her companions as they traveled to various gigs. At heart she was a girl wanting to enjoy the experience of growing up and adjusting to the world.

Things only really started going wrong once she crossed the Rubicon from well-known jazz artist into international star. Feted on television in both Britain and the United States, it seemed as if the world was her oyster. Yet it was also evident that she was too much influenced by hangers-on wanting a piece of her. Her husband Blake Fielder, a feckless junkie, introduced her to hard drugs; a succession of ineffectual managers including Monte Lipman failed to shield her from the media; and her father came back into her life as someone more interested in making money than protecting his daughter. Kapadia's film suggests that perhaps her father was most at fault for his daughter's decline; in one sequence he brings a camera-crew to St. Lucia, thereby ruining Amy's attempts to enjoy some kind of peace away from the media.

Amy's troubled life is juxtaposed with performances of her greatest songs, whose lyrics are put on screen as she sings them. It's clear that she wrote from bitter experience; the only way she could make sense of it was to write about it. We get the sense that Amy performed first and foremost for herself.

Her untimely death at the age of twenty-seven remains something of a mystery. From the evidence presented in this film, we are left uncertain as to whether she took her own life or whether she died accidentally. Given the prison-like existence she led for the last five years of her life, culminating in the now-notorious occasion when she failed to perform at a Belgrade concert, it's tempting to think that she had had enough.

Few of her close associates come out with any credit as a result of this film. It's almost as if they wanted to exploit her, and when she died, they ascribed the tragedy to fate rather than admitting responsibility for it. This is especially true of Mitch.

The ending is almost unbearably poignant. It seems such a sad waste of a unique talent. Nonetheless at least we have her musical legacy in the form of her recordings, both live and in the studio.