“Fame doesn’t fulfill you. It warms you a bit, but that warmth is temporary.” — Marilyn Monroe

Her looks were as lush as her voice, her life as dark as her lyrics. Amy Winehouse was a pop star, a gorgeous, sweet Jewish girl from London’s North Side, with huge Mid-Eastern eyes and dazzling teeth.

Amy Winehouse, superstar, rode the golden rocket to a closer view of fame’s glowing sun, and when her wings from the heat of the paparazzi’s lights grew too hot, she plummeted to the bottom. It’s a story so oft told, that it should simply be a template hauled out; one size fits all occasions. We’ve all heard it played out loud.

We all remember Judy and Janis, Bessie and Billie, sisters of soul and sorrow. No need to add the last names; they’re part of musical history like Ella and Sarah.

Amy was one of them, not really a jazz singer, a master of “scat” like Ella, but with more blues, more soul. She knew those top notes, but she owned the bottom blues notes, those notes that Bing Crosby once said, “Down there, that’s where the money is.”

Real blues and soul singers like Amy could go down there and rattle around in the basement of the heart where the pain is, where those memories live in the shadows. Amy knew that. Amy could do that.

But she wasn’t limited to it the way Billie Holiday was. Amy never had her “Strange Fruit.”

Amy could be more playful and climb the register up to where the tinkle is, and with a twinkle in her eye, break your heart like a young girl at her bat mitzvah.

Asif Kapadia’s brilliant documentary is a punch to the chest, a visual kick in the stomach. He doesn’t preach or moralize. He reports.

Asif scooped up the thousands of words, photos, videos from family and friends, snaps and shots taken by her faithful manager Nick Shymansky, and a myriad childhood and musician friends.

We get to meet a few of the good guys who were loyal, like her faithful bodyguard Andrew Morris, with whom she had a “brother-sister relationship.”

Kapadia trots out and burns the bad ones like her first love and only husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, a man whose only talent was holding on tight to a rising star, so that he could inhale the perfume at the top without paying the tab.

It was Blake who took her from smoking weed all day as a teenager to the devil’s music of crack cocaine and heroin.

We meet her handsome, ex-cab driver Daddy, who may have loved her, but didn’t really know the rules of that game, but who managed to stay in the frame of every picture taken of her.

The film makes Daddy, like Brian Wilson’s papa, appear to have developed a taste for money, like a shark’s taste for blood. It was he who kept her nose to the mic, and pushed her onto one stage after another, when she was sick and couldn’t cut it. Make of that what you will.

Oh, Amy loved it. She loved the stage, she loved the screams of the crowd and flashing lights, until it reached the point, as Judy and Janis knew, when all of that became like a smothering velvet blanket. When she just wanted one night to lay down and dream of darkness, “Daddy” got her out there. It was on such a night, at a monster rally concert in Belgrade, as Kapadia shows us in full color horror, that Amy stumbled out, eyes and face smeared with makeup, hugged the band members, staggered around, and sat down like a beautiful doe that has been gut shot and is waiting to die.

The voices of the band members are recorded, “She’s wasted,” “She doesn’t know where she is.”

When the audience booed, she tried to sing, but the notes wouldn’t come. It’s one of the hardest scenes to watch in the film.

You’ll be temporarily warmed by the first part of this incredible film. It’s like watching all those family videos of your beautiful daughter getting ready for the prom, at her first dance class, her first sleepover with girlfriends. And then it’s as though the script was turned over to Stephen King, and it all goes dark. The last half is a nightmare. Amy develops bulimia and drinks quarts of alcohol to avoid the drugs she craves, but knows it will kill her.

The night before she died, Amy called a friend and said, “I don’t want to die.” And the beat goes on.

We’re told that Mitch Winehouse is handling the Winehouse Foundation and pursuing a singing career, billed as Amy’s father.

For those of you who think a movie should be made of Amy’s tragic life, let me assure you, it already has.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.