Whitney biopic leaves the key questions hanging

Naomi Ackie gives a superb performance as Whitney Houston in the new biopic of the singer, the greatest voice of her generation and, apparently, the most awarded female artist in history.

But almost inevitably, it’s a film that leaves far more questions hanging than it actually answers. The problem is that we are dealing with someone who lived and breathed and who fairly recently died; someone for whom most of the key players are still alive.

Which inevitably means that this film comes from a certain perspective. It’s just a question of working out whose.

Take Whitney’s record producer Clive Davis (played by Stanley Tucci) who is presented in glowing terms as the guy who senses Whitney’s talent, who works with her to select the songs and who is the one who has the courage to tell her that she needs to go into rehab. He is unfailingly kind, unfailingly supportive, and, who knows, he probably was in real life too.

But the trouble for the film is when you see his name come up as its executive producer.

He has had the chance to portray himself exactly how he wants – which seems significant in a film which does seem to split the people around Whitney into the goodies and the baddies.

Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), Whitney’s early friend and apparently lover, is presented as the quiet force for good who is overlooked once Whitney’s father John Houston (Clarke Peters) starts to exploit Whitney’s massive potential, dishing out credit cards and private jets to all and sundry and ultimately using Whitney – as she eventually realises – as his very own cash point. And then there is the arch villain of the piece, Whitney’s husband, the younger bad-boy bad-influence Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders) who, more than anyone, the film seems to suggest, hurtles her towards self-destruction. Presumably Brown’s own version would be rather different to this.

Perhaps we are just too close to Whitney’s death to get any real understanding of it, but the film is utterly uninterested in why her rehab didn’t work and where the drugs came from, not least on that fateful day in February 2012 when she was found dead in her bath at the age of 48. Oddly the film doesn’t mention that her daughter died in horribly similar circumstances just three and a half years later, aged 22.

In the end, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody feels too much like someone’s version of events and that’s probably why it doesn’t ultimately satisfy – though where it does succeed is in portraying the pressure that came with Whitney’s astonishing voice, the expectations, the tours, the temptations.

How and why she died aren’t really explained. Was there really no one looking after her? Or are we supposed to believe that it was all tragically inevitable?

There’s no doubting that Naomi Ackie gives a wonderful performance, helped by Whitney’s dubbed-on voice.

There is a real sense of the passage of time, of the rising hopes and the hopes realised before it all comes crashing down.

Which makes it seem even more of a shame that the film seems to shy away from the questions that really matter.