Ironies – both intimate and enormous – imbue It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley with much of its thematic weight. So it’s only apt that they also contribute to its artistic buoyancy.
For the most part this does feel like a straightforward musical biography, with copious and well-chosen footage of the late singer-songwriter both onstage and off. But though his life and art were influenced most visibly by men, director Amy Berg (West of Memphis) chooses to tell his story in large part through women. We hear emotional memories and thoughtful insights from his single mother, Mary Guibert, his good friend Aimee Mann, his former girlfriend Rebecca Moore, and his longtime partner Joan Wasser (the musician known as Joan as Police Woman).
We’re also witness to his own broken heart, cleaved both by the parent who abandoned him and the world that wouldn’t allow him to move on. Even as Jeff was trying to understand what it meant to be the son of celebrated singer Tim Buckley, he despised the way everyone else wanted to understand it, too.
And there’s another paradox as well, one that’s likely to remain with viewers every time they hear his music from here on.
As his admirers already know, and Berg shows us at length, he put tremendous effort into crafting his own work. He also pushed back hard against a commercial mindset that coldly exploited creativity.
Fans will fiercely argue that Buckley has so much more to offer than Hallelujah
Buckley became increasingly disenchanted by the business side of music, and we can see hints of a path that’s become sadly familiar in stories of sensitive young artists (including, it must be said, his father): towards emotional instability or mental illness, perhaps exacerbated by substance use.
But as it happens, the punk angel with the four-octave range also had a rare and remarkable mimetic gift – which made him an unusually skilled interpreter of other artists, from Nina Simone to MC5 to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And today, he is arguably best known for his elegiac cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, a rendition that’s moved millions even while corporate media has come to rely on it as an easy emotional touchstone.
Fans, of course, will fiercely argue that Buckley has so much more to offer. And in the strongest compliment to Berg’s affectionate portrait, she makes a similarly convincing case, with ample and tender grace.
In US theaters Fri Aug 8.