There is a tacitly accepted set of rules that our culture follows when it comes to women in the spotlight. They are required to be thin. They do not eat a normal diet and that in and of itself is seen as normal, not even dangerous. Disordered eating is so normalized in our culture, especially in celebrity culture, that few people even acknowledge that it’s not healthy, and very potentially fatal. Eating disorders fall in line with what society expects of a celebrity—we love thinness so much, yet we know we’re supposed to be repulsed by the means of achieving that thinness—it's easier to scrutinize their lifestyle or their partying than ever examine the toll of staying under a certain weight.

Amy Winehouse learned those ugly rules of womanhood early, as footage from Asif Kapadia’s devastating, much-praised documentary Amy reveals. A teenaged Winehouse, snacking with her friends, laments between mouthfuls that she’s a pig and she cannot help herself. In a voiceover during this sequence, the singer’s mother Janis Winehouse recounts the moment a young Amy tells her mother about discovering a great new "diet"—eating and then vomiting—that allows her to eat without gaining weight.

-=-=-=-The film avoids editorializing at this point or any other—the format, consistent with Kapadia’s earlier, also critically-acclaimed documentary, Senna, involves audio interviews and raw footage, but no commentary—yet no editorializing is required in order for a viewer to feel distraught—the next few sentences to come out of Janis’s mouth are enough. She muses that she essentially ignored the statement and forgot about it, thinking it was a silly teen girl activity that Amy would soon grow out of. She says that when Amy told her father, Mitch Winehouse, as well, he also dismissed it.

This casual dismissal—the first mention of Amy Winehouse’s eating disorder—is wrenching, and comes almost halfway into the film. For many viewers, this may be the first they have ever heard about Winehouse’s eating disorder. As well-documented as her struggles with alcohol and drug addiction were, the tiny little fact of her severe, untreated, decade-long eating disorder was rarely mentioned. When her thinness was mocked in the media, it was almost always with the implication that hey, addicts are always skinny little wrecks. If her puffy face was ever evaluated—and it was, because every aspect of her physical appearance was eviscerated during the height of the media’s obsession with her—it was through the lens of someone looking for signs of alcohol addiction (which commonly causes bloating in the face) and not signs of self-induced vomiting.

Winehouse’s struggles with substance abuse were highly public and often ridiculed and, as many others have noted, the film does an outstanding job of laying bare the damaging impact that media coverage and celebrity-worship can have on the real, flesh-and-blood artists. She is quite literally attacked by paparazzi during highly personal events such as visits to rehab and her husband’s prison stint.

Amy also documents in thorough detail the many attempts by those surrounding the singer to get her help—both for altruistic reasons (read: because they cared deeply for the sparkling, kind, immensely talented woman) and for selfish motives (read: because they cared deeply about the fame and money that Amy could bring them as long as she was able to comport herself in the studio and on tour).