I n 2007, 24-year-old Amy Winehouse, the English pop singer and songwriter, was asked where she would like to be in ten years’ time. “I’d like to have a couple of kids,” she said. “Two or three. I’d like to be there.”

But Winehouse never got there. In 2011, at age 27, she died of alcohol poisoning in her London home. A new biopic, Back to Black, named after Winehouse’s bestselling album and directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, tells the story of the short-lived pop icon.

This is not the first attempt to do so. The biopic is preceded by a 2015 documentary, Amy, directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, which won multiple awards including an Oscar. Yet Kapadia’s documentary, which used archival footage, upset Winehouse’s father, whom it depicted as more interested in the benefits of secondhand fame than in his daughter who desperately needed help.

Mitch Winehouse, Amy’s father, said the documentary caused him to have a nervous breakdown: “The film has been edited to fit the filmmakers’ preconceived Ideas [that] Amy was exploited and left to her own devices [and] the last three years were a descent into hell/family complicit, etc.,” By contrast, Back to Black — preapproved by the Winehouse family — strives to present Amy (Marisa Abela) as a much-loved family member and as more than the sum of her self-destructive tendencies.

Mitch (Eddie Marsan) occasionally appears to underestimate the extent of his daughter’s drug and alcohol addiction. (In Winehouse’s hit song “Rehab,” she discusses being pressured into going to rehab but refusing: “And if my daddy thinks I’m fine . . . I won’t go go go.”) At other times, he reacts more strongly. He berates her for having marijuana in her home. “It’s weed!” Winehouse protests. Her true gateway drug is her former husband, Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell).

As she is newly besotted with Blake, her “Nan,” Cynthia Winehouse (Lesley Manville), asks, hopefully, whether he’s Jewish. He’s not — but the bigger problem is his taste for hard drugs. “You got an eye for the bad boys,” Nan warns. Their relationship spirals into drug and alcohol abuse, and (for Fielder-Civil) prison time for assaulting a bar owner.

Contrast this disastrous relationship with Winehouse’s relatively stable family background. Her parents are divorced. Nevertheless, her family is close-knit, with a strong sense of Jewish identity and a shared love of music. Winehouse is particularly close with her Nan, whom she says is her “style icon,” and she has an unusually strong sense of self. “I ain’t no f***ing spice girl,” she tells her manager.

Winehouse was emphatic that she was not in the music business for money or fame. She mixed jazz, soul, and reggae. She was old school, adopting a 1960s hairstyle, and drawing on Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, and Aretha Franklin as well as Sarah Vaughan. In interviews, she came across as unconventional and charming.

Abela’s impersonation of Winehouse’s vocals is extremely impressive. But sometimes her portrayal is too cutesy. As with every addict, the drink and substances Winehouse abused had a corrosive effect on her personality. The fundamental battle was not between sobriety and intoxication, but between the genuine, talented, family-loving young woman and the ferocious, consuming demon of addiction, unleashed by the toxic influences of the celebrity lifestyle and a mutually destructive relationship.

After Winehouse died, the singer Josh Groban stated that “drugs took her gift, her soul, her light, long before they took her life. RIP Amy.” But in Back to Black, Winehouse’s death seems almost inexplicable.

In the movie’s final scene, Winehouse is depicted climbing the stairs to her bedroom, encased in light. While such delicacy may be appreciated by Winehouse’s family, and even by some fans, it hides the brutal reality. The movie claims that Winehouse died after “a long period of sobriety,” but that’s not exactly true. The New York Times obituary noted that, just one month before her death, “she cancelled a European tour after a performance in Belgrade on the first night, during which she appeared to be too intoxicated to perform properly.”

In less than a decade, Winehouse deteriorated from the happy, healthy, and endearingly unique 20-year-old (as seen in her 2004 interview with British talk-show host Jonathan Ross) to a very underweight, tattooed drug addict. Back to Black does not pinpoint why that transformation occurred. But it does convey the tragedy of Winehouse’s unrealized potential and wholesome desires.

In one scene, Winehouse tells Fielder-Civil that she was “not put on this earth just to sing.” She “wants to be a wife,” wants “to be a mum.” We see Winehouse and Fielder-Civil sitting as they wait for a pregnancy test, experiencing crushing disappointment when it comes back as negative. When a little girl asks her for her autograph, she shows maternal tenderness, reassuring herself, “One day.” In Back to Black, what appears to tip Winehouse over the edge is learning from paparazzi that Fielder-Civil, having divorced Winehouse, had just had a baby with his new girlfriend.

Back to Black is part cautionary tale, part tragedy. And part mystery, too. Why do those with so much going for them self-destruct?