Amy Berg’s previous film, focusing on Janis Joplin, was an excellent portrayal, and she returns to the notion of lost talent in the new documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.
By Miles Salter
The film chronicles the life and art of the late songwriter, who was widely praised for his 1994 album Grace but died tragically just three years later.
His father was ‘60s troubadour Tim Buckley, a good-looking young man who released a brace of albums in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He died in 1975 from a heroin overdose.
Jeff barely knew his famous father who walked out on the young family when Jeff’s mother, Mary Guibert, was pregnant. She was just eighteen when her son was born. The boy and his mum took a stance against the world, but there were emotional repercussions. A sense of abandonment and resentment accumulated.
By his early teenage years, Buckley was playing in bands. He was blessed with abundant good looks, great cheekbones, and thick dark hair. An early performance was at a sort of tribute show for his father, Greetings From Tim Buckley, in 1991. He drew from a wide range of influences; he adored Led Zeppelin, but also Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Smiths, and even Shostakovich. He drew on everything that caught his ear. If it moved him, it was part of the well of inspiration.
His cafe gigs in New York were fuelled by word of mouth, and the venues became packed with rapt audiences. Buckley had the gift of delivering music with such intimate power that it was impossible not to be affected. Record companies came calling, and he chose (of course) Columbia, the home of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Mahalia Jackson.
The resulting album, Grace, released in 1994, showed his brilliance as a vocalist and a wide variety of musical styles, from thrashy band numbers to songs that were introspective and softly spoken. While the album struggled in the USA, in Europe it was a huge hit.
It won him fans in Paul McCartney, Alanis Morrisette, and others. After seeing Buckley perform in London, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke was so inspired he was able to finish his vocal on the problematic Fake Plastic Trees.
Berg’s film is an intimate portrait. The executive producer is Brad Pitt, who is a huge fan of another sensitive songwriter, Nick Drake. The film is aided using animation to enliven Buckley’s handwriting and drawings. He exhibited traits that suggest he may have been bi-polar and sometimes struggled with boundaries.
In the audience for a gig by his heroes Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, he became so excited that he climbed the scaffolding near the stage – a perilous journey. He dabbled in drugs. He was in tune with his own turmoil. At a gig where he met singer Aimee Mann, he suggested some sort of sexual adventure, but she saw through it. ‘You need love, not sex,’ she told him.
Buckley seemed to have a sense of his own mortality and that he wouldn’t be around for long. A clip in the film shows him answering a question about the future, but he says (unsmilingly) that there will be only ‘a void’. This is common in young talents who burn brightly. Marc Bolan shared the same feeling that he wouldn’t last.
Buckley drowned in Wolf River, a tributary of the Mississippi, in 1997. He was thirty years old. The completed follow-up to Grace was never released, although there are plenty of live albums and demo recordings for fans to peruse. His masterful cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah occupies a place in an elite club, having surpassed one billion streams.
Jeff Buckley is one of a stream of artists who left the world at the height of their powers, when they were young and beautiful. Those close to him are left with stories and questions that reverberate. The ending of the film shows his mother, Mary, playing a cassette of a phone message her son left her, full of gratitude and wonder. Some of this emotion will undoubtedly be felt by the audience.
There’s plenty of emotion and grief in Berg’s film, but also a kind of subdued, halting sense of life’s strangeness, that a brilliant talent can be marked by imperfection, that the universe works in sometimes chaotic ways. At the end of the film, Berg’s title seems absolutely accurate – it’s never over.
