IT was, for a moment, as though the world skipped a beat in 2011. Looking back, has it really been so long since the death of Amy Winehouse?

Aged just 27, the London born singer-songwriter had already five Grammy awards and an eight-times Platinum selling album to her name at the time of her passing. Thirteen years on, Back to Black remains the twelfth best-selling album of all time in the UK.

It is from that album, her second, that Sam Taylor-Johnson’s new Amy Winehouse biopic takes its name. Many have tried and failed to dramatise the all-too-short Winehouse story across the last decade. Back to Back is the first to cross the finish line.

Even so, many have decried the film as landing too soon after so tragic an end. Winehouse died with a blood-alcohol level more than five-times the legal drink-drive limit. The coronary verdict, misadventure, only hinted at a wider and more painful truth.

The story has already been told in film, of course. And yet, where Asif Kapadia’s acclaimed - and Oscar winning - 2015 documentary, Amy, might have been considered a necessary critical study, Back to Black risks sensationalising a young woman’s rise and fall via dramatisation.

Such is not the sole source of controversy around Taylor-Johnson’s film. Unlike Amy, Back to Black has been produced in association with Winehouse’s family - the very same family who critiqued Kapadia for not painting them in the very best of lights. One suspects that the same will not be true this time around.

Regardless, it is the film’s leading lady upon whom all eyes will be trained. Biopics cannot help but draw out a certain morbid curiosity in the recreation. Marisa Abela certainly looks the part. She’s a fair singer too, though no one could truly channel Winehouse in that regard.

Eddie Marsan and Juliet Cowan co-star as Mitch and Janis Winehouse, with Lesley Manville joining as Amy’s grandmother, Cynthia, a fellow singer. As for Blake Fielder-Civil, Winehouse’s tempestuous on-off boyfriend and future husband, he’s played by Jack O’Connell.

Blessed with familial endorsement, Back to Black, whatever you make of it, benefits from the jukebox treatment. Amy’s greatest hits line up and beam through the screen. It’s hard not to come away wondering what might have been had such a talent not wilted so early in a burgeoning career.