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This year has already brought a well-received documentary, “ Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” about the Nirvana front man, a fellow member of the 27 Club and whose own struggles in the limelight closely parallel Winehouse’s.īut what sets “Amy” apart from similar train-wreck bio-docs aren’t necessarily any new revelations. And the growing abundance of music-related documentaries following the Oscar wins for “20 Feet From Stardom” and “ Searching for Sugar Man” is not abating. Yes, the heady steady climb to success followed by a dizzying downward spiral is a staple of cautionary showbiz sagas. Many of the danger signs were there even before the incendiary element of celebrityhood arrived on the scene: An addictive personality, an often-maddening passive-aggressive nature, an unhealthy appetite for drugs and alcohol, a passion for reckless partying, a weakness for manipulative men, daddy issues that dated from her parents’ break-up when she was a child, lifelong struggles with depression, bulimia and self-doubt.
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Whether she was busily scribbling her sexually-charged confessional lyrics in her girlish curlicue handwriting or wailing away at maximum strength minus a backing track in a recording studio with note-perfect pizzazz, Winehouse is revealed to be a natural-born entertainer with a raw sound and street style that borrowed from the past – a sultry Sarah Vaughan at the intersection of bee-hived Ronnie Spector and fragile Edith Piaf – while being her own person and true to herself as an artist.īut, as the film also makes all too clear, Winehouse was cursed with an array of dysfunctional traits that would inevitably combust into an inferno of public self-destruction. Winehouse seemingly had the vocal goods to have gone down in history as one of the all-time greats based on what is on display in “Amy,” a highly absorbing, sensitively told and ultimately devastating documentary directed by Asif Kapadia (“ Senna”). Thus, Winehouse became a charter member of the “27 Club,” which refers to the age of such music legends as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison when they reached their own much-too-early expiration dates. For a time, her catchy signature tune, the all-too-appropriate “Rehab,” was inescapable and helped shape her coquettish bad-girl persona.Īnd, almost as quickly, she succumbed to the ultimate showbiz cliché, dying from accidental alcohol poisoning in 2011. What most of us do know of Winehouse, a throwback to the great jazz songstresses of yore who was also informed by hip-hop, reggae, girl-group pop and soul, is that this North London-born chanteuse burst onto the scene like a supernova and burned up the charts with her 2006 breakthrough album “Back to Black,” selling over 20 million copies and winning five Grammys.