Amy Berg’s Stirring Doc Tribute

Ten years after her Janis Joplin bio-doc, Janis: Little Girl Blue, director Amy Berg returns to the music world with It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, an adoring portrait of another blazing talent who died way too young, leaving an influential legacy. Every fan — whether those of us who got misty-eyed to his music in the ‘90s or romantic teenagers discovering him in recent years via social media — has their favorite Buckley songs. Mine oscillate between “So Real” and “Grace,” “Last Goodbye” and “Everybody Here Wants You.” For Berg, whose connection to the artist’s music pulses through every moment of her new doc, it would appear to be his transcendent cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

That’s an entirely valid choice and a popular one, it being Buckley’s only song to reach No. 1 on a Billboard chart — in 2008, 11 years after his tragic death at age 30. But it also adds to the feeling that, like many music docs sanctioned by family members controlling the artist’s estate — in this case his mother, Mary Guilbert — it’s an approved version rather than a film that digs deep or finds new angles.

Don’t be mistaken, there’s loads here to satisfy anyone eager to dive into the life and work of the singer-songwriter with an astonishing four-octave vocal range and a falsetto that could shatter hearts alongside a powerhouse hard rocker screech. He’s an engaging subject in archival interviews, many of the performance clips are swoon-worthy, the music sounds better than ever and it’s fun to hear Buckley enthuse about his eclectic influences — from Judy Garland to Nina Simone to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Led Zeppelin to Soundgarden to The Smiths; Bill Evans to Shostakovich.

Simplifying all that in a 1995 interview, he says: “My major musical influences? Love, anger, depression, joy… and Zeppelin.” Returning the compliment, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant had high praise for Buckley’s stunning first and only studio album, Grace, as did Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Morrissey.

All this is great stuff. But for fans already conversant with Buckley’s output and the mythos surrounding him, there may not be much that feels terribly new or revelatory.

Berg is an accomplished filmmaker with both docs and narrative features under her belt. She and editors Brian A. Kates and Stacey Goldate put together a stimulating package that moves at a brisk pace, varying the visual textures and identifying the distinctive qualities that made Buckley such a soulful new voice in music when Grace was released in 1994. But there’s a slickness to It’s Never Over, with its doodly screen graphics, ribbons of “hand-written” text and psychedelic effects, that seems slightly at odds with the raw emotionality, the plaintive yearning of Buckley’s music.

The timing of the doc so soon after A Complete Unknown underlines the degree to which Buckley was a throwback, his early career trajectory echoing the genesis of many in the 1960s New York City folk scene, three decades earlier. While Dylan came up through the basement venues of the West Village, Buckley first began making waves at East Village dive Sin-é, playing impromptu sessions for a handful of customers that grew into packed houses with crowds spilling out the doors. The audience inevitably soon included record company execs, and he signed with Columbia, just as Dylan had in 1961.

Prior to his Sin-é exposure, Buckley’s first public performance in New York was at a starry 1991 tribute concert to his father, folk rocker Tim Buckley, who had left Guilbert when Jeff was 6 months old. Father and son met only once after that, spending a few days together just months before Tim’s death in 1975 at age 28 from a heroin and morphine overdose. The younger Buckley was reluctant to play at the tribute because he wanted to be understood through his own music, not by comparison with his father. But Guilbert talked him into it.

Buckley’s ambivalence toward his father surfaces repeatedly in Berg’s film. When an interviewer asks what he inherited from his dad, Buckley flatly replies, “People who remember my father. Next question.” In a poignant moment, his drummer on Grace, Matt Johnson, recalls Buckley at 29 saying he had already outlived his father.

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Probably to keep the focus squarely and respectfully on her subject, Berg does not linger over parallels between the deaths of Tim and Jeff Buckley. That association fueled the mystery around the latter’s drowning in the Wolf River in Memphis in 1997, just as the similarly untimely deaths of comparable artists Nick Drake and Elliott Smith did, respectively before and after Buckley. The romantic “too pure for this world” narrative woven at times around Drake, Buckley and Smith mercifully does not come up.

It’s understandable that the doc would want to distance itself from those drug-related deaths, emphasizing that the autopsy report showed just one beer in Buckley’s system when he drowned, and rapping Rolling Stone on the knuckles for choosing to omit that information from its coverage. He was known to dip into drugs but was never an addict.

Still, a number of factors swirling around his death — the dark images of water and drowning that recur in his lyrics; the calls in the two weeks prior to pretty much everyone he knew that had the air of a farewell; the heartbreaking final message he left for his mother; the fact that he went into the water fully clothed, including his boots — contributed to speculation that what was ruled an accidental drowning may have been premeditated suicide. By not even touching on that school of thought, however much it’s been discredited, Berg adds to the sense that this is a stringently authorized portrait.

Even so, the strength of the film, beyond its wealth of archival material, is the very personal nature of the present-day interviews. Most notable among them are Guilbert, who freely concedes she was an imperfect mother but makes the love she and her son shared abundantly clear. There’s moving input also from former girlfriends, including musician Joan Wasser, and especially, Rebecca Moore, who gets emotional recounting that he ended his last call to her saying, “Know that I love you.”

Passionate fans of music icons are always going to want their version of the story, which possibly accounts for some of my nitpicky reservations about Berg’s film. And maybe for the huge discrepancy between quality and volume in the explosion of music docs in recent years.

An artist of Buckley’s caliber — nicely described at one point as conforming to neither masculine nor feminine types on the music scene, and having a liquid, watery quality that felt “very tidal-wavey” — is always going to instill a sense of ownership in anyone with a connection to their music. It’s Never Over might not be the Buckley bio everyone needs, but it’s a stirring tribute made with a lot of heart.