‘It’s Never Over Jeff Buckley’ Review: Amy Berg’s Reverent Documentary

The human voice, as we all know, is as much of a musical instrument as any other instrument. But Jeff Buckley had a voice that was so breathtaking, so ethereally soaring, so reaching for the heavens in its virtuosity that it’s as if he’d been given a different instrument from everyone else in pop and rock. Not that he wasn’t profoundly influenced. He had a four-octave range, and when he ascended into the upper registers, with that theremin wail and that incredibly fast vibrato, he sounded like his greatest idol, Nina Simone, crossed with his other greatest idol, Robert Plant, crossed with the most impassioned angel God had ever gifted.

In “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” Amy Berg’s rapturous documentary about Buckley’s extraordinary rise in the ’90s and his tragically cut-short life, we hear Buckley sing in every conceivable context: in clubs, in stadiums, in the recording studio, and when he’s just sitting around. And as we drink in the majesty of his voice, the film lays bare a paradox about him that isn’t nearly as apparent if you just listen to “Grace” (1994), the only album he ever released.

When you envision the quintessential Jeff Buckley sound, you tend to think of one of his slower, meditative drifting numbers — like, famously, his cover version of “Hallelujah,” which is so spellbinding in its deliberation that he seems to be weighing and burnishing every word. That’s the Buckley who first wowed small audiences at Sin-é, the East Village hole-in-the-wall venue (it sat 30 to 40 people) where he was discovered. Someone recalls that when he was performing at Sin-é, you could hear a pin drop.

But Buckley was as much of a rock ‘n’ roller as he was a hipster chanteuse. In the documentary, there’s a clip where someone asks him what his influences are, and he says, “Love, anger, depression, joy…and Zeppelin.”

He wasn’t kidding. Robert Plant sang way up high because he was following in the tradition of Black blues singers who sang in women’s ranges as a form of empathy and seduction. Of course, Plant also used those keening high notes to express an appetite for destruction. With Buckley, his sound was even more layered. There was a side of him that wanted to sound like a woman — but he also wanted to sing like the ’70s metal god whose voice was a pure assertion of male power. When Buckley sang slow, he was lulling and hypnotic, but when he placed that voice atop an up-tempo rock ‘n’ roll song (like, say, the title track of “Grace”), the result was every bit as transcendent. He came up in the era of grunge, but he expressed something much different: an abandon that was lyrical.

Jeff Buckley, during the time he was alive, was thought of as a cult rocker, a kind of “musician’s musician.” In the movie, there’s a quote from David Bowie saying that he thought “Grace” was the greatest album ever made. We see photos of the time Paul and Linda McCartney went to visit him backstage. And what the documentary captures, I think, is that Buckley was on his way to becoming a staggeringly huge star. I defy you to see “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” and not fall in love with Jeff Buckley’s voice. By the time the film is over, you want to find a way to go back and rescue him to let him live the life he should have.  

But in May of 1997, Buckley, who had moved into a shotgun shack in Memphis (he was still recovering from three years of touring), drowned in the Wolf River. As tends to be the case when a rock star dies out of the blue at age 30, many jumped to the conclusion that drugs were involved. But, in fact, as the toxicology report revealed, Jeff Buckley had one beer in his system and no drugs. His death was not a “drug casualty.” And so it was called a tragic accident. The movie officially takes that point of view as well. Yet if you look closely at the story it’s telling, what you see is that Jeff Buckley’s death had an eerie and haunting outline to it.

What Amy Berg, the great documentarian who made “Deliver Us from Evil” (2006) and the definitive Janis Joplin film, “Janis: Little Girl Blue” (2015), accomplishes in “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” is to bring Jeff Buckley alive as the insanely charismatic budding rock star he was, but also to color in the underpinnings of his life that lent it an almost mythological aura. Skinny and raw-boned, with dark eyes and a razory grin, Buckley was a real James Dean — the kind of glamorously tousled rock star they don’t make anymore, and he might have been the last of that breed. These are the kinds of people we look up to as gods, seeing them as glamorous, untouchable, iconic in their beauty and slouching rebellion.

But Buckley had demons. His father was Tim Buckley, the gifted eclectic late-’60s folk rocker, who ditched Jeff before he was even born. Jeff was raised by his mother, Mary Guibert (who is one of the film’s executive producers), which may not sound like that unusual a situation, except for the way that Tim Buckley was at once not there and there. He was a known musician, who had bequeathed Jeff his talent if not his love. He hovered in the background and in the air, making Jeff feel like his father was a ghost who was haunting him.

In the movie, Mary recalls that the first time she heard Jeff sing was when he was still in a basinet. Jeff says that he heard Diana Ross’s version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and that was it, he was gone. Possessed by music. We hear about how Mary took the young Jeff to see Tim play once, and he wound up spending a week with his father. But then he got sent back by himself on a bus. And Tim, with demons of his own, died of a heroin overdose in 1975.

In 1991, when Jeff was 24, he agreed to perform, along with a host of other artists, at a musical tribute to his father held at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn. He did it reluctantly, and didn’t want to stand out. But his voice rang out in that church to the point where he stole the show. A lot of musical royalty was on hand, and he walked away with 60 business cards. The music world wanted him, and why not? He was already on the way to becoming a greater artist than his father.    

He did not set out to be famous (though there’s a way that you can’t be a famous artist without wanting to be). As the film show us, his gigs at Sin-é were low-key, unpretentious, with the sound of the espresso machine in the background. Yet he became a sensation. Courted by record companies, he signed with Columbia, the fabled home of Dylan and Springsteen, and made “Grace,” an album that consisted of original material interspersed with some of the cover versions that had become his trademark.

By the time “Grace” was released, in August 1994, launching not just Buckley’s career but, in a way, his identity, he’d made the decision to put his father behind him. When asked if he was carrying on Tim’s legacy, he would reject the comparison; he was his own musician. But as we drink in Jeff Buckley through the archival material — the photographs and, especially, the ’90s video footage — that Berg has assembled with her usual transfixing skill, and through the searingly candid interviews she presents of two of his most prominent romantic partners and muses, Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser (both musicians), we begin to get immersed in a story unlike that of any other in rock. Buckley looked, and in many ways acted, like a quintessential rock star, and as he went on the “Grace” tour, audiences around the world fell for him. But his voice wasn’t merely a majestic instrument — in a very real way, it tells us the story of who Jeff Buckley was.

Buckley’s intense identification with singers like Nina Simone and Edith Piaf — and his ability, almost unheard of in a male singer, to evoke their artistry ­— was about the music he loved, but it also carried a psychological component. He was in thrall to what he saw as the preeminence of women. His every soaring note was an homage to their majesty. On some level, this aspect of him was formed by the father who had abandoned him. He loved women and didn’t trust men.

But what of his own male energy? He was a gorgeous icon of rock stardom, but he had a profound ambivalence about his own male spirit. He grooved on it, but he was also, while not a grunge rocker, part of the Kurt Cobain generation. Cobain, who sometimes wore dresses onstage, had a relationship with his own masculinity that was so self-critical I would argue it bordered on the masochistic.

In many ways, these young male rockers were ahead of their time. They wanted the future to be female. But as we watch the documentary, what happens to Jeff Buckley in the last part of his life is at once mysterious and patterned. He becomes subject to mood swings, and reckless behavior, to the point that the theory is floated that he may have been bipolar, or even had a psychotic break. That’s all conjecture; we’ll never know. But what the film shows us — and this is not conjecture — is that during the weeks before his death, he made a series of phone calls to many of the people he knew, and what he did in those conversations, one after another, was to apologize and seek closure; it sounded like he was saying goodbye. Mary Guibert plays us the last voice-mail message he ever left for her, and there, too, he seems to be paying tribute to his mother with an eerie finality. There’s a clip in the movie of Jeff chatting with his buddies, and when the subject comes up of where he thinks he’ll be in 10 years, he draws a weird kind of blank. He says he can’t imagine it.

The most profound aspect of Jeff Buckley’s death, and this was captured in David Browne’s brilliant book “Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley,” is that the very fact of it, the died-too-youngness of it, rhymed, in a karmic fashion, with his father’s death. I don’t believe that Jeff’s death was a suicide, but it was an outgrowth of his reckless behavior (no one swam in the Wolf River). So maybe, on some level, Jeff was acting out his cavalier attitude toward his own masculine spirit.

But he was doing something else as well. Jeff, the James Dean rock star who worshipped Robert Plant, wanted to revere his own male energy. He didn’t want to distrust it. And what that means is that he wanted to love the father who had left him. So in the end, what he did was to mirror Tim’s abandonment — of the world, and of Jeff. Jeff Buckley was a sublime artist, and his death was a tragedy, on a human level and for rock culture. But part of the tragedy is how hard it is to escape the feeling that Jeff Buckley died so that his father could love him.