This documentary on the career and demise of Amy Winehouse provides chapter and verse on her too brief trajectory from ingenue to superstar to pop culture punching bag to the grave. It’s the same sad endlessly repeated story of our news/entertainment industry building up and then destroying celebrities.

The celebrities are adults. No one forces them to take drugs, drink to excess, or run around making a public mess of their lives. The behavior of the media and those around Winehouse in this case feels especially ghoulish though. She was so young and blew up so fast. And her father, her management, and her husband acted with such greed and callousness that it almost feels as though she didn’t have a chance.

Some childhood friends and music collaborators tried to help Winehouse, but she eventually pushed them aside to follow those exploiting her. It’s hard to see in the moment, but often our best ally is our fiercest critic.

This movie packs more punch than many celeb cockup docs, because visually it almost always has Winehouse front and center. The director, Asif Kapadia, does a great job pulling together home videos and archival footage from friends and associates of Winehouse fooling around, performing, and eventually in full collapse. One moment shows her stumbling down a sidewalk bruised and bleeding surrounded by the paparazzi jackals, their shutters whirring and flash bulbs detonating, but no one with the simple empathy to say, “Hey, do you need help?” It’s enraging.

I’m not a violent guy, but in that moment, I fully understood why Sean Penn punched one of these guys in the nose. In the next moment, I realized that I’m witnessing this moment through the lens of a camera, probably held by another paparazzi, who was there to get paid. Paid by the tabloid news shows in the short term, but who also was also almost certainly paid by Asif Kapadia to use the clip in this movie. In the end, the viewers those shows and of this movie are funding the whole thing.

There’s no escaping complicity.

Streaming now on Kanopy.