Amy: Poignant portrait of a terminal descent

From the initial sequence, where a teenage Amy Winehouse mucks about with her friends and then casually breaks into song, this gripping and increasingly grim documentary about the late singer's life and death hones in on the person behind the sudden burst of fame and the tabloid headline fate. Asif Kapadia's film notes her oversized achievements, but it's not wowed by them, and if anything, Amy makes the case that success was to blame for his subject's death in 2011 at the age of 27.

Raised on jazz and the instigator of soul's revival, Winehouse was a lippy, loyal girl from North London with a once-in-a- generation voice; music industry deals of all sorts – management, publishing and recording – were achieved with minimal effort. Her second album, 2006's Back to Black, would eventually sell more than 20 million copies with a posthumous surge, which is a fitting full stop to a career where her lucrative output and personal health were rarely on the same page.

Kapadia, whose previous documentary Senna examined the late Brazilian formula one ace Ayrton Senna, has interviewed Winehouse's family, lovers, friends and collaborators. But he doesn't show them – the focus is always Winehouse, seen through home movies and archival footage that plays alongside the recollections to create a kind of coronial document.

It's intense and increasingly damning, as you watch Winehouse change from a young hopeful embarrassed about her acne spots before playing a pub gig to a hounded addict whose instinctive talents begin to dissolve. The film doesn't offer a verdict, but it provides evidence hard to ignore: Winehouse tried desperately to please men who ultimately used her, despite good intentions.

Her father, Mitch, who walked out on his family, was one, as was her husband Blake Fielder-Civil, a Camden party boy whose interview here is delivered in a deathly rasp that matches his deeds. "I'd used by then, and enjoyed it," he says by way of recalling how his wife was introduced to crack and heroin, the drugs that damaged her body so much that her heart subsequently failed.

What the film makes clear is how connected Winehouse's lyrics were to her life. Handwritten lyrics match events that participants recall – they really did try to make her go to rehab and she, backed by her father, said no – and her descent into terminal velocity is scored by the incessant blast of paparazzi cameras as fame is rendered as a horrible curse. There's no let- up and it's impossible to look away. "She needed someone to say no," recalls a sympathetic voice, but it's only her bodyguard speaking.