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Young people pass a voting information sign on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2022. | Elijah Nouvelage/AFP It’s not what you think. Long before the Israel-Hamas war broke out, young Americans were already souring on President Joe Biden. That discontent has only picked up in the last few months — registering in polls as increased support for Donald Trump and third-party candidates, and defections from the president, but not necessarily from his party. The reasons for why this is happening have become one of the defining questions of the 2024 election so far. But what if this horse race is missing the point? A new poll of young voters shared exclusively with Vox provides an important corrective: Young voters aren’t all that mystical; they’re a lot like the average American, concerned first and foremost with the state of the economy. “People tend to have a skewed perception of what young voters prioritize,” Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for the Democratic-aligned public opinion research group Blueprint, which conducted this polling, told me. “A large part of that is because there are ways politically that young voters are very different and very distinct in what they care about. But the places that they’re different shouldn’t be confused with the places that they care the most about.” This tracks with what my election reporting has turned up this year: Economic and affordability issues are far and away the top concern for all young voters in Blueprint’s latest poll. Progressive priorities, like climate change, student loans, and even the Israel-Palestine conflict, rank far below kitchen table issues. Notably, the poll does not ask about a match-up between Biden and Trump, or about 2024 vote preferences. Those horse-race topics are the primary way that public debates and the discourse around young voters have been conducted this year, leading to foundational and epistemic questions over how much we can trust polling and whether we’re reading too much into the crosstabs or methodology of polls. So what does this poll tell us? A lot. Here are the top four takeaways. It’s the economy — and health care Blueprint surveyed 943 registered voters between the ages of 18 and 30, recruited from an online panel from April 27 to April 29. The margin of error is 5.8 percentage points. Those participants were asked how important a variety of issues were to them, and able to choose multiple priorities. Across every kind of young voter asked — Democratic, independent, or Republican; Black or Latino or white; college-educated or not — some variation of an economic concern was a top electoral issue. As a whole, inflation and the economy were the most frequently prioritized issues, chosen by 73 percent and 70 percent of young voters, respectively. Health care was the only rival issue — cited frequently by Democrats, Black and white voters, women, and those making more than $75,000 a year — and chosen 71 percent of the time by all young voters as a top priority. The top priority for young voters is also the one where they trust Biden least When young people talk about the economy, they overwhelmingly mean lowering prices on food, gas, and services — not creating more jobs, lowering interest rates, or even earning higher wages (though that’s the second most important thing). That dynamic is nearly the inverse of the way the president has been talking about his economic record and about his plans for a second term. For most of his presidency and the campaign so far, he’s primarily talked about wage growth, cutting junk fees, and the historically low unemployment rate. And young voters see this: there’s a 37-point gap between how much they want Biden to prioritize lowering prices, and how much they think he is. Trump, meanwhile, is seen as focusing on prices. And this is the crucial conclusion: Trump is trusted more than Biden on the single most important issue: 52 percent say they trust Trump over Biden to reduce prices. “Young voters trust Joe Biden more than Donald Trump on just about everything — except lowering prices. That’s a real problem,” Roth Smith told me. “If your only bright spot is the one that matters, that’s something that worries me, as a Democrat.” The issues we associate with young voters aren’t very salient When talking about young voters today, it seems like most politicians and the journalists covering the nation seem to default to a handful of progressive priorities: climate change, student loan cancellation, identity politics, and the war in Gaza. But at least according to this poll, those don’t tend to be the issues that young voters are prioritizing the most. Among the lowest-priority issues in this survey are LGBTQ issues, student loans (both chosen 38 percent of the time), while climate change, Israel and Palestine, democracy, and race relations were chosen just about half the time. And they don’t necessarily want Biden to make a major change on some of these topics. A good chunk of young voters actually say that Biden is closer to their views on student loans (43 percent say this), and about 42 percent of independent voters say Biden is close to their views on abortion, student loans, and immigration and the border. Which leads us to… Young voters are idiosyncratic; they aren’t the progressive saviors some people want them to be As I’ve written before, the youth aren’t necessarily going to save us. “At a moment when people are sitting at home, watching campus protests or climate protests, and go ‘Wow, this new generation has totally different priorities,’ really, when you start to survey everyone, you find out that the kids are just like us,” Roth Smith said. They are almost an even ideological mix of moderate, liberal, and conservative — something many other surveys have found — but many still think Trump is not moderate enough. For example, while about half of young voters see Biden as liberal, 74 percent say that Trump is conservative. They are more divided over how much more liberal or more conservative Biden should become; 37 percent would prefer he move to the left, 31 percent would prefer he move to the right, and 32 percent prefer he stay where he is. “The difference for Trump is just about everyone who wants him to move wants him to move left,” Roth Smith said. While 39 percent want him to stay where he is, 45 percent want him to be less conservative. It’s possible to draw out one more conclusion from this state of play: though young voters are upset, these conditions and feelings about Trump don’t seem to point toward a massive shift of young Americans toward Trump. They do point to plenty of problems: the top concern for a second Biden term is that he would be too old to do the job, followed by continued price increases, and being too pro-Israel. The top Trump concerns are more personal: that he would cut funding for Social Security and Medicare and cut taxes for the rich but not the working and middle class. All this suggests there are plenty of opportunities for Biden to shore up his support, for his campaign to improve its messaging and targeting of voters, and for direct attacks on Trump that go beyond “Dobbs and Democracy.” But it would be a mistake to assume that young voters are drastically different creatures. We’re essentially normies. We’re just young. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Researchers have been hard at work on a number of male contraceptives, some of which could hit the market in the next couple of decades. Options include a hormone-free birth-control pill, an injection that accomplishes the same thing as a vasectomy but is easily reversible, and a topical gel men can rub on their shoulders with little in the way of side effects. There is a recurring theme in the research on male contraceptives: easy, convenient, minimal side effects.“From the get-go, the researchers involved in developing male contraception have paid extra- close attention to: Can we develop products for which there will be almost no side effects? And can we be extra vigilant about this, so that these products are going to be basically the most convenient, easy things ever, with almost zero risks?” says staff writer Katie Wu, our guest on this week’s Radio Atlantic. In fact, one trial was halted in 2011 because a safety committee decided the risks outweighed the benefits. The side effects included mood swings and depression, which, if you are a woman who has ever been on any form of hormonal birth control, will definitely shift your mood.What changes in a future in which male contraceptives are readily available, and a routine part of men’s health care? For one thing, the dreamy nature of these options might inspire researchers to innovate on women’s options as well. But a lot of cultural conversations could also shift: around whose job is it to be vigilant about pregnancy, who can have sex without consequences, and what we think of as traditionally masculine.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode:Katherine J. Wu: ​It’s intuitive to think, you know, you need two people to conceive a child. And currently—Hanna Rosin: Wait, what?Wu: [Laughs.] And currently our contraception options are almost entirely limited to one biological sex: people with ovaries and a uterus.[Music]Rosin: That’s Atlantic staff writer Katie Wu—and when she puts it like that, yes, the math is so obvious. It takes two to make a baby. And yet when I say “birth control,” we mostly think of one: the one with the ovaries and the uterus.I mean sure: condoms, vasectomies. But the whole complicated apparatus of birth control—decades of hormones and doctors’ appointments and implants and worry, the costs—that’s something mostly women have to deal with.But of course it doesn’t have to be that way. Why didn’t I realize that sooner?I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today—the rapidly advancing science of male birth control.As a science and health reporter, Katie’s followed this research for years. When we spoke, I was curious—maybe even hopeful—to see if the impetus for the research was to ease the burden on women. Here’s Katie.Wu: There’s a couple motivations, like certainly just having a little bit more equity in this whole world of family planning. If there are two people participating in the conception of a child, if the goal is to actually prevent that, why shouldn’t multiple parties participate? It would certainly ease the burden on women, who are the primary people having to deal with the logistics of contraception, the side effects of contraception, paying for contraception, accessing contraception—even stigma around certain contraception, especially in parts of the world where contraception is not necessarily widely socially accepted.But also to this idea that tackling something from two different vantage points— sperm and egg—is going to make the whole endeavor a little bit more successful, right? Combining two methods of contraception: that’s not a bad way to go about it if you really want to be sure that you are accomplishing your goal.Rosin: That’s interesting. And the scientists say this? Like, the scientists working on this say, Yes, we’re doing this partly for equity reasons?Wu: Oh, absolutely. I think there is this growing feeling that the burden of contraception, preventing pregnancy, and taking on the risks of doing that has really fallen unfairly on women. And it’s time that we spread that around a little bit more. There are actually male participants in trials for some of these birth-control methods—for male contraception—who say part of the reason that they want to participate is they watch their female partners go through the side effects and the hassle of taking birth control, and they feel guilty, they feel frustrated, they feel like, Why can’t I be doing more to help out?Rosin: I’m a little speechless and a little…I don’t know, I’m just heartened to hear that. It never occurred to me—maybe I’m just too cynical—but I’ve been so accustomed to thinking of birth control in the current political context that it just never occurred to me that in science there was this decades-long effort to make this whole process more equitable. It’s really nice to hear.Wu: It is, though of course I have to jump in here with a little bit of cynicism, right? It certainly has not been perfect culturally. And I think, as encouraging as it is to hear that a pretty decent contingent of people do feel this way, of course there’s been pushback on that idea—and there’s certainly reasons why it has taken so long to get to the point where we’re on the cusp of having widely available male contraception beyond condoms and vasectomies.Some of those reasons are definitely scientific, right? We’re dealing with a totally different reproductive system. But I think we also do have to acknowledge that people are just a lot cagier about asking men to take on extra risks, extra burden, when the viewpoint has been for decades: “We don’t have to. The women have that covered.”Rosin: Yeah. Okay. I really want to get into that, but before we do, let’s just have some basic understanding. What are the methods people are looking at? Like, what can we expect in our local pharmacy in the men’s contraception section soon, in our near future? What is it? What are they?Wu: Yeah, so I will caveat this to say that not all of the things I’m about to mention will necessarily be on pharmacy shelves. Some of them will have to be maybe sort of roughly akin to having an IUD placed. It will require you to go to a doctor’s office.But there are a bunch of different options. Probably the one that is furthest along is this topical gel that has been in trials for several years now, that men can basically smear on their shoulders. And it’s this hormonal concoction that really, really dramatically plummets their sperm counts.And if they apply it regularly, it’s a pretty great and almost side-effect-free way to control their own fertility—and totally reversible.Rosin: Wait. That sounds comically easy. Like, you put basically like a gel on your shoulders, and it has no side effects?Wu: Okay, it doesn’t have zero side effects, but I certainly am comparing this to a baseline of like, the typical side effects we see with female birth control. Mood swings and depression.There is almost none of that that is being reported in trials. Men actually sometimes experience increased libido, and the investigators have been really surprised to see like, Oh, you know, there’s really not much going on here in terms of the typical side effects we see with female birth control.Rosin: Mm hmm. Why is this irritating me? Okay. You know what—Wu: Oh, we’ll get to it. I promise.Rosin: Okay. All right. So keep going. What are some of the other methods?Wu: Yeah, so another that I think is super interesting is what I sort of liken to a really easy, reversible vasectomy. So, you know, traditional vasectomy: You have this quick surgery where you go in and you’re messing with the vas deferens, which is the conveyor belt for sperm.That is a surgery, but this new method that researchers are experimenting with, they’re basically plugging up a tube with a gel that can either dissolve or be removed at a later date. So that, you know, it’s pretty easy placement—it’s just plugging a hole, like a stopper to a sink that you can remove.Basically capitalize on the convenience of having sperm so readily accessible, like right there in the testes, which hang outside the body. A lot harder to reach eggs that are hiding out in ovaries: deep in the abdominal cavity sometimes.Rosin: Wait, you’re saying it’s easier? Like, biologically, the male contraception is an easier proposition?Wu: Certain parts of it are. Others aren’t. As you can imagine, some of the more challenging things is there are so many sperm being produced constantly, and so many sperm in, you know, every attempt at conception that it can be hard to get them all. But on the flipside of that, we only have to reduce sperm counts to a certain degree, not to zero, to make someone effectively infertile, even if only temporarily.Rosin: Right. Okay. I’m seeing a theme here, which is: quick and easy.Wu: Absolutely. And I think about the diversity of options. I mean, I’ve only named two, but we’ve already covered something that is super long-acting and reversible—the set-it-and-forget-it kind of method. One is hormonal. One is non-hormonal. And there are others still that could be a pill that you may only have to take occasionally, rather than every day, to, like, stop your sperm from being motile.Rosin: And how plausible are these things? Definitely a train that’s coming into our station? Like, this is definitely going to happen at some point?Wu: I think some of these methods are far enough along—probably that topical cream, especially—that, you know, researchers, even ones who aren’t directly involved with the trials, are pretty optimistic that, yeah, maybe sometime in the 2030s, this will really become a reality.I think even just having a couple options for men on the market will be a big step toward equity. But there are also some kind of frustrating things about how exactly that’s going to manifest.Rosin: What do you mean? Why?Wu: Oh, right. So I think we have both noticed, as I’ve been talking through these options with you, that these sound pretty great. Obviously some unexpected hurdles could arise, some unexpected side effects could still crop up, but so far it really is looking like we’re fast approaching a reality in which men are going to have easy access to super-convenient, super-effective birth control that hardly gives them any side effects at all.While in the meantime, millions of women are like: Oh no, I have terrible acne again, or I have extreme pain because my IUD is doing weird stuff to my body. And that just seems like we could be doing better.And I mean, this is not an accident. And I think that is one of the most frustrating parts of this. From the get-go, the researchers involved in developing male contraception have paid extra-close attention to: Can we develop products for which there will be almost no side effects? And can we be extra vigilant about this, so that these products are going to be basically the most convenient, easy things ever, with almost zero risks?Rosin: Okay, now I’m speechlessly infuriated. So, okay, just to summarize: You’re just saying that what’s on the table, what they’ve been very vigilant about, is: Let’s make sure this is easy. Like, it doesn’t have side effects, and it’s easy. And they didn’t really worry about that too much with women.Now, what I was hoping you would say is that, scientifically, it’s just too difficult, too hard to devise birth control for women that is that free and easy. But you’re not saying that. You’re just saying it just wasn’t a priority—we don’t know if it’s easy or doable.Wu: Absolutely there have been different sets of standards for men and women. And the argument for this, over the years, has been one that—depending on who you are and how you feel about a bunch of different things—you may find reasonable or not. This idea that, yeah, it’s the woman who gets pregnant, the woman who must bear, literally, the risk of pregnancy.And so, she has more to lose if the contraception doesn’t work. And so she should be willing to take on more risks with contraception that she takes, because she’s weighing that against the risk of pregnancy. For men, you’re taking contraception inevitably to prevent pregnancy in someone else.And so, it’s not: Am I going to get this headache? versus—become pregnant.It’s: Am I going to get this headache? versus—nothing.Rosin: Right; the incentives have to be extra strong. Like, it has to be extra easy to get men to play along with this.Wu: Yeah, I think it’s both a marketability thing, but they also do have to contend with these kind of independent safety boards. And those safety boards have certainly been stricter about saying, “Well, if we really are doing the risk-benefit calculation of every step along this clinical trial, we’re going to do the math a little bit differently, because we know what the risks are in Scenario 1 and the risks are in Scenario 2.”And so, like, it’s kind of funny, because there have been trials for male contraception in the past that were paused by these independent safety boards because they were thinking, Oh my God, the math is not working out. The risks to men are so great. And meanwhile, participants in the trial that was paused were actually like, “Actually, I would have kept going with this if you’d let me,” so… [Laughs.]Rosin: Wait, but were those a question of safety? Or what was the challenge there?Wu: Right. So this was a trial that was stopped in 2011. Basically, this independent safety committee determined that the drug side effects outweighed the potential benefits. But the side effects were mainly mood swings and depression.They were experiencing side effects that I would certainly say a lot of women go through with their own birth control—even nowadays with our updated methods.I will freely admit that I was pretty frustrated when I learned about this. At the same time—and maybe this is the cynical part of my brain speaking up—it didn’t shock me.I think, at face value, this illustrates the double standard that is absolutely still going on with birth control. And at the same time, it also is almost sickly validating. Because for anyone who is sitting here wondering Why don’t we have these options yet?: This is it. This can help to explain a lot, and I think this illustrates what has to be overcome.Rosin: So we’re edging toward the scientific breakthroughs, but it sounds like we still have cultural barriers to overcome: notions about masculinity, responsibility, promiscuity—all that. After the break.[Music]Rosin: Alright, we’re back. Katie, we’ve been talking about equalizing this burden between men and women. What gets in the way of that? In the past, what’s stopped that from happening?Wu: I think we struggle to reconcile some of the common side effects we associate with birth control with our modern conceptions of masculinity. Is it especially not okay for a dude to take a drug and have his sex drive go down? To undergo mood swings and get really emotional? To break out with acne in his 30s? We have, for whatever reason, socialized that to be normal and acceptable for women, but this is not a norm that we’ve been taught to accept for men. And I think there may be an additional struggle there.Also, certainly anyone who has a problem with female contraception right now in today’s world is going to have some concerns about male contraception and, you know, the implications of that for promiscuity. How we think about sex for the purpose of, you know, not conceiving, but just having sex.I mean, God, I would love to see people re-conceptualize this as like, “Who’s allowed to have a sex drive?” Right? We’ve been so cagey about men losing their sex drive for x, y, and z reasons, to the point that this is a prominent concern in trials for male contraception. If that can help inspire more enlightened thinking about how important it is for women to maintain a sex drive—and for them to even have a sex drive to begin with, and for that to be culturally okay—that would be fantastic.Rosin: Yeah. Hear, hear. Okay. So, we understand now that the pill was a massive cultural revolution. We can see that now. From everything you’re saying, there is a possibility that we’re on the brink of another moment like that.Like, there could be—maybe you’re laughing inside—but, could we, if male contraception, if they figure out how to message it correctly, if it starts to show up slowly and then be accepted in the mainstream, is there a possibility that it helps build a sense of genuine shared risk and responsibility for sex and having a baby?Wu: I hope so. I mean, I certainly see this future playing out in gradients rather than a switch being flipped. And any step in the direction of more equity I will take it. I do fully anticipate that there is going to be pushback against male birth control. I mean, there already is. I think if you go into the darker corners of the internet, you will see that people are freaking out about the fact that these trials are even happening, and like—“Why bother? The women already have it fixed.” Blah, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine the sorts of things that people are already saying.Rosin: Because why? Because it destroys masculinity? Like, I don’t actually know what the cultural, even if it’s the dark cultural resistance…Wu: I will admit it’s hard for me to get into this space, as someone who has never felt this way. And I also, I am not a man. But I do think there are some concerns about masculinity. The production of a lot of sperm is very tied up in traditional notions of masculinity, and this is something that would directly imperil that. I also think there is just a lot of pushback against the newness of the notion that contraception should be a shared risk.For people who think that box was checked long ago by products being made available for women, this seems like an unnecessary additional risk for huge swaths of men to be taking on.Rosin: Got it. Right. Now, among the scientists, do you get the sense that the future they see is a possible replacement for the pill in lots of quarters? Because I can imagine a situation where: A couple sits down, they’re looking at a male contraception that has virtually no side effects. Most female contraceptives have some side effects—some very significant side effects. And they would choose the male contraceptive.Wu: Yeah, it’s a great question. And opinions about this are a little divided. I think a lot of researchers are curious to see what is going to happen. I can see on an individual-to-individual basis how, for a lot of couples where the woman has really struggled with the side effects of birth control, or not wanting to go through somewhat invasive procedures to have longer-acting methods placed.There are many good reasons to not be excited about women’s contraception right now. There may be a scenario in which male birth control replaces female birth control within those couples. But I also have heard from a lot of people that they don’t expect overall-population or community-wide enthusiasm for female contraception to really diminish all that much.There are going to be a lot of couples who want to team up and use multiple methods at once. You know, why not? That will that much more decrease the chances of pregnancy.It’s almost like using both an IUD and a condom, but splitting that even more equitably between men and women at this point.And then I think this is a slightly more cynical reason, but there are going to be plenty of women who don’t trust their male partners to fully take on the responsibility, even if that does become pharmaceutically an option.Is the male partner in the scenario going to apply that cream regularly enough?Rosin: Right. Like, it definitely opens up the question of shared responsibility. It doesn’t necessarily explode it, so that we’re all of a sudden living in a different world. But I do feel like it inches closer. And I am thinking about what changes in society if we start to think of preventing the birth of the child as also the responsibility of a man. We kind of vaguely do now—like a condom, very vaguely. But when a man has many, many options, it becomes harder to duck, you know?Wu: Right.Rosin: It shifts the burden of vigilance.Wu: I would hope so. I’m sure there will still be a lot of lingering sentiment that women’s contraception should be the biggest safety net here, because unfortunately some men will continue to see this as a still very low-stakes endeavor for themselves. But we’ll see. I think another thing that I am excited about that could shift things culturally, and just make all of this feel easier for women in a kind of indirect way, is maybe this could inspire female contraception to be less riddled with side effects, to be more convenient, you know, to take some inspiration from the male side of things.Why can’t we revamp female contraception at the same time?Not just by saying, “Hey, there are more options for your partner to take,” but “There are also better options for you to take, too.”Rosin: So, just to end here: An equitable world for you, given where you know the science is going and what’s possible, what would it look like?Wu: Well, it would certainly go beyond contraception. Probably.Rosin: We can go there if you want. I was mostly thinking about like, let’s limit it to the pharmacy aisle. Like, if we’re talking about contraception, and I’m going to a doctor or walking down the aisle, what is equitable?Wu: I mean, I think there are a lot of ways to imagine how that future would be different. Certainly pharmacy shelves would look different. But also would we have, you know, a revolution in medicine? Would we train a huge contingent of doctors to be a larger counterpart to what we currently see as the realm of OBGYNs?And, you know, would those conversations start to happen with men? Would we, like, regularly check in with men about their sperm counts, their fertility, how they’re participating in their partner’s health? That sort of thing.And I would certainly hope that there would be expanded thinking about how to access these options. Like, how are we going to think about who is able to access them, how insurance is going to cover them? You know, what is going to require a prescription versus what can just be grabbed off the counter.If there’s going to be a huge disparity in the methods that are available, can we at least think about, like, making several options freely accessible to men and several options being freely accessible to women, so that it’s not creating or reinforcing the sort of gender disparity that we’ve been talking about?There are just so many things. And like, gosh, even how sex ed is taught in schools. That could really start to change young people’s minds about gender and sexual freedom and just the culture around all of this, from really early.Rosin: Oh, wow. Okay. I hadn’t thought of this. You’re blowing my mind now. So basically what you’re talking about is all of the complications and variations and the whole idiom we’re used to around women’s health. That same equivalent starts to develop for men—not just male contraception, but at every step.Like they’re taught in schools. Not just “wear a condom” but that it’s their responsibility to take contraceptions, and how contraceptions affect them. They talk to the doctors about what the contraception will do to them. You know, they talk to their partners, and on and on. And that’s where you get a sense of equal investment, price paid and joy, in the whole process of family planning.Wu: Totally. And I think what’s fascinating about this is: You can even think about the tale of these interventions being different for men and women. Women go through menopause. Men don’t. You know, there’s a universe in which men and women, young men and women, maybe start to think about contraception, use contraception around the same time. But maybe because men might end up using it for several more decades than women in this utopian future that we’re imagining, you know, maybe that actually helps push things, again, in the direction of, “Yeah, this is actually something that should really be a normal, natural, sustained part of how we envision male health, and what it means to be a man alive for multiple decades in this world.”Rosin: Wow. Yes. Okay. My thinking on this has been so limited, and you’ve just thoroughly expanded it. So thank you so much for that.Wu: Happy to help.[Music]Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Ebeid, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in the 2024 film “Back to Black.” | Courtesy of Focus Features Thanks to this new movie about Amy Winehouse, the bar for movies about musicians remains in hell. Since the first stills of actress Marisa Abela sporting winged eyeliner and a matted beehive emerged online, the new Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black has been met with mockery, if not total dread, from fans of the late British singer. It wasn’t just that Abela bears little resemblance to Winehouse, dressed in what looks like a last-minute Halloween costume. Given the amount of shoddy musical biopics that are being released ad nauseam, it seemed like an inadequate medium to explore the musician, who died of alcohol poisoning at 27 in 2011. Since its initial release in the UK, several critics have already affirmed these hesitations. Making a biopic is always a delicate art form. By nature, these films are primed to be over-dissected and picked apart for historical inaccuracies, flawed impressions, and limited perspectives. In the case of Back to Black, though, the depiction of Winehouse rings both false and strikingly convenient for the people who were involved in her life. As Jason P. Frank and Rebecca Alter write in Vulture, the film spends too much time “trying to reclaim her as wholesome,” against the tabloids’ vilifying coverage. More significantly though, it fails to address the ways the UK’s sexist media and the people around her contributed to her demise. As a result, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh end up placing most of the responsibility for Winehouse’s downfall on her fragile shoulders. Needless to say, any attempt to dramatize Amy Winehouse’s life was going to generate polarizing opinions. But Back to Black, along with a recent slew of biopics, makes one curious as to what extent viewers must suspend their expectations and fan knowledge to enjoy a film based on true events. Biopics can never fully encapsulate a person’s life. But Back to Black is an attempt to erase history. Courtesy of Focus Features Marisa Abela singing as Amy Winehouse in the 2024 film “Back to Black.” Winehouse’s career — hampered by addiction and bulimia — is hardly the stuff of a crowd-pleasing popcorn movie. Her story never stood a chance within the confines of the genre. Biopics, particularly from major studios, have to shrink a person’s life into a palatable enough story that will attract the largest audience and generate the most money possible. Even with its R rating and a melodramatic flair, Back to Black is shockingly sanitized, neglecting to capture just how ugly and violent her experience actually was. In Back to Black, Winehouse is strangely isolated from the media blitz that surrounded her life. Beginning with her early songwriting days as a teen, the script remains focused on the intimate familial and romantic dynamics that would make the biggest impact on her as an artist — specifically, her relationships with her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), her father Mitch (Eddie Marsan), and, most of all, her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, who would serve as the muse for her hit album, Back to Black. Somehow, her most notable musical collaborators, Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, are merely footnotes in this story. The movie isn’t really interested in Winehouse’s creative process or inspiration either, aside from name-dropping some of her favorite soul artists. Even at the height of her visibility, Winehouse spends almost all of the movie in London, specifically Camden Town, visiting loved ones, performing for small crowds in pubs, and stumbling drunkenly through the street. Aside from a notably disastrous performance at the Glastonbury Festival, you wouldn’t know that Winehouse performed shows and made public appearances outside of the UK and had many friends, including other British celebrities and musicians. Needless to say, zooming out and portraying Winehouse as a public person would require addressing the intrusive, predatory treatment she faced from the media. At the height of her insobriety — which spawned multiple drunken live performances, arrests, and paparazzi photos of her looking bloodied and disheveled or openly doing drugs — she became not just a punchline, but practically a meal ticket for journalists and paparazzi. Tabloids mocked her body without any consideration of what appeared to be an eating disorder. Meanwhile, other outlets and comedians counted down her remaining days alive. Even after her death, she continued to be a punchline. Controversially, actor Neil Patrick Harris hosted a Halloween party a few months after her death with a meat platter labeled with her name and resembling a rotting corpse. In Back to Black, though, moments of Winehouse being chased by paparazzi or publicly mocked are fleeting, or else noticeably absent from the storyline. Audio of comedian George Lopez announcing her Grammy nominations in 2008 is played in the film but cuts out before he makes a joke about her addiction struggles to the audience’s chuckles. Additionally, her rare encounters with the paparazzi in the film don’t totally represent what an invasive presence they were in her life, particularly as she began to publicly spiral. In fact, the most devastating interaction she has with the press is at the end of the film when a paparazzo provokes the recently sober singer by asking about Fielder-Civil’s newborn child with his new girlfriend. The movie is rather ham-fisted in conveying Winehouse’s unfulfilled desires to be a mother, as if it’s a compelling sign of virtue for the troubled singer. That said, she immediately becomes heartbroken at the mere mention of her ex’s offspring — so much so that the film frames the moment as the cause of her relapse, prompting her death. The men in Winehouse’s life are strangely given a pass. Another problem comes along in the film with the inaccurate portrayal of the men who had the biggest impact on Winehouse’s life — her father, Mitch, and her ex-husband, Fielder-Civil. After more than a decade of tasteless interviews and attempts to profit off Winehouse’s memory, it’s hard to view either of these men in a favorable light. Still, the movie positions them as collateral damage in Winehouse’s path of destruction. As Back to Black tells it, these men were simply trying to oblige her irrational needs, not purposely enable them. Not only do these characterizations feel funky to anyone who’s familiar with their public antics — for example, Fielder-Civil has been accused of selling details of his and Winehouse’s love story to the tabloids — their soft depictions, in comparison to hers, feel like an extension of the same sexism she experienced in the press. For instance, Winehouse’s relationship with Fielder-Civil in the film lacks some much-needed nuance regarding the troubling amount of power he held over her life. While Fielder-Civil has a large presence in the film, his contribution to her ruin — he admitted that he introduced her to heroin, crack cocaine, and self-harming — and the ways he seemed to prey on her weakness are glaringly understated. For the most part, he’s framed as an earnest and charming bad boy who dabbles in hard substances, which Winehouse just happened to fall into alongside him. Furthermore, as Little White Lies writer Rogan Graham notes, it’s questionable that Taylor-Johnson “goes out of her way to depict Amy’s first time trying hard drugs as an occasion when she’s alone.” These characterizations feel funky to anyone who’s familiar with their public antics Back to Black doesn’t have much to say about the role of her father in Winehouse’s downfall either. Despite Mitch walking out on her family as a child, Amy shared a strong bond with her father, which she commemorated with a “Daddy’s Girl” tattoo on her left arm. In the film, he’s portrayed as the biggest advocate of her singing career, protective against the other men in her life and excessively doting. While he may have been these things at certain points in her life, the 2015 documentary Amy illustrates a more complicated portrait of their relationship. In the Oscar-winning film, directed by Asif Kapadia, Winehouse’s friends recount her father rebuffing their pleas to send Winehouse to rehab. (This moment isn’t portrayed with much reflection in Back to Black, rather just an anecdote leading up to her hit single “Rehab.”) Amy also revisits the time Mitch bombarded his daughter with a camera crew while in St. Lucia, where she fled from the public eye after getting sober in 2008. The footage was for a 2010 Channel 4 documentary called My Daughter Amy, where he, in part, expressed his own frustrations and regrets in dealing with his daughter’s addiction. After the film aired, Winehouse tweeted that the documentary was “embarrassing.” Considering that Winehouse’s family didn’t authorize or have any say in Back to Black, according to Taylor-Johnson — although, they have endorsed it — it’s even more shameful that the film spares him from any sort of skepticism regarding the way he maneuvered in his daughter’s life. Instead, perfunctory scenes of Mitch inquiring about her weight and rushing her to a rehab facility (after he initially said no) feel like concerted PR. Will musical biopics ever make us happy? With all of its missteps and murky intentions, Back to Black might just be the tipping point in a prevalent conversation about the function of musical biopics and what we should demand from them. As early as 1946, when Cary Grant played legendary composer Cole Porter in Night and Day, musical biopics have been a huge profit generator for both the film and music industries. Following the Oscar-winning and box-office-breaking success of the 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Hollywood — and musical artists looking to hike up their streaming numbers — have co-signed a sudden stream of lackluster or, in the case of Back to Black, utterly egregious biopics. In the past five years alone, movies offering conservative portrayals of Bob Marley, Elton John, Judy Garland, Whitney Houston, and Aretha Franklin have left much to be desired. As with comic-book movies as of late, it’s hard to engage with these films as much more than cash grabs coming down Hollywood’s IP conveyor belt. This barrage of big-studio biopics is emblematic of a formula that’s proven to be commercially successful and easy to replicate. The expected melodramatic flourishes and rousing moments that make up these movies have become so obvious that they’ve inspired a subgenre of biopic parodies, like This Is Spinal Tap, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping. When the projects transcend their conventions, they’re often the experimental work of arthouse directors, like Todd Haynes, who telegraphed Karen Capenter’s anorexia with Barbie dolls in The Karen Carpenter Story: Superstar and portrayed Bob Dylan with multiple actors in I’m Not There. (There’s also his equally good fake rock biopic, Velvet Goldmine.) Other times, they’re elevated by dynamic performances, like Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon playing Tammy Wynette and George Jones in Showtime miniseries George and Tammy. In general, though, there’s a seemingly impossible problem in having actors embody musical giants — like Winehouse — who we connect to because of their unique talent, personalities, and overall flair, which simply can’t be replicated. It’s hard to engage with these films as much more than cash grabs coming down Hollywood’s IP conveyor belt In a post-Me Too Hollywood, there did feel like a more obvious lane for a Winehouse biopic to occupy that would’ve at least made it feel more truthful. Many recent biographical projects outside of the musical subgenre have served the specific purpose of redeeming women from harmful public narratives and providing empathy for their experiences in the limelight. One could argue that the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde was a (very poor) attempt to make audiences sympathize with an actress whose life was ridden with turmoil — although, the lurid fabrications in the film complicate this. The Pablo Larrain film Spencer, a similarly experimental take on Princess Diana, shed light on her eating disorder and feelings of imprisonment as a member of the royal family. Another arthouse film, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, offers a more meditative counterpiece to Baz Luhrmann’s technicolored extravaganza Elvis, which neglected to address the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s abusive treatment of his then-wife, Priscilla Presley. At this point, maybe it would’ve been reductive if Back to Black was mostly about Winehouse’s victimization. Amy already does a decent job of laying that out. Plus, these cultural reappraisals have become formulaic in their own way. However, illuminating the patriarchal forces that helped derail her life would at least provide some context for her fragility, rather than positioning her as an inevitable trainwreck destined to happen. One could easily imagine a more compelling film interested in exploring the way Winehouse’s bulimia and the insecurity she dealt with affected her life and relationships. Instead, Back to Black adds up to nothing more than Daily Mail headlines.