We sallied forth to our local Cineplex last night to watch Amy, the documentary about the short, tragic, brilliant life of singer Amy Winehouse. It’s a great documentary for sure, at once engrossing and very very difficult to watch.

I recall during her very public decline, it seemed unreal, as if she were a comic-book figure existing for the benefit of the trash press. But Amy the film makes it all too real. The footage is simply stunning – both showing Winehouse’s incredible ability, her total emotional attachment to her music, to clips of a woman coming apart at the seams, drunk, stoned, wasted, withering.

The film paints Amy Winehouse as a very sensitive, vulnerable individual, a woman who was suffering from bulimia and depression, self-medicating, self-destructive, a performer ill-prepared for the life her success catapulted her into.

It also paints the star-maker machinery, the out of control celebrity locomotive as an unrelenting meat-grinder, one in which the singer didn’t have a chance.

At one point in the film, Tony Bennett says something like (sorry I don’t recall the exact quote), life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough. If.

Recommended. Go see this one.