The first thing I learned in college was that if I wanted to talk to interesting women, I needed to get into Jeff Buckley. The big-voiced rock singer seemed to gaze pleadingly, and handsomely, from posters on the walls of every girls’ dorm room I was invited to enter, even though this probably did not happen often enough to produce a representative sample.
By then, Buckley had already been dead for a few years. His accidental drowning in 1997 had transformed the 30-year-old performer from a respected but commercially marginal major-label artist into a cult icon and a figure of tragic romance — less grim than many rock casualties, but still devastating for all the music he didn’t end up making.
Buckley’s long shadow relative to his small body of work — one proper album (1994’s “Grace”), a few live recordings and some outtakes from what would have been his sophomore release — is the subject of “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” a reverent new documentary streaming on HBO Max.
The film, directed by Amy Berg, explores why Buckley remains a singular figure in rock history, in part because of the ways he specifically didn’t fit into 1990s music culture. At a time when mainstream rock was heavy and repetitive, Buckley played the guitar intricately and sang in a heavenly, precise tenor with a stunning range.
In a culture saturated with irony, Buckley sang open-hearted anthems of longing and love, citing Edith Piaf and Judy Garland as influences just as often as Led Zeppelin and the Smiths. At a time when most rockers were obsessed with punk cred, Buckley was covering Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen, delivering a definitive rendition of “Hallelujah.”
But like all impactful rock figures from his era, Buckley had a conflicted relationship with the spotlight. In his case, it was understandable, because every time his name appeared in print, he was identified as the son of Tim Buckley, a prominent folk-rock singer from the late 1960s until his death in 1975, whom Jeff barely knew.
He was raised by his mother, Mary Guilbert, a key subject in the film and, crucially, the person who controls the rights to Buckley’s musical afterlife. Since “It’s Never Over” depended on her participation (she’s credited as a producer), it tends to suffer from the same lack of candor that characterizes most modern music documentaries and biopics.
This means it includes nothing that risks tarnishing the posthumous brand, and no mention of any romantic partner who wouldn’t be interviewed. (Give me a whole documentary about “All Flowers In Time Bend Towards the Sun,” a jaw-dropping duet he recorded while briefly involved with Elizabeth Fraser, from the U.K. dream-rock band Cocteau Twins.)
“It’s Never Over,” however, does make a compelling argument for the musical legacy of an artist whose creative life was sadly cut short. “Grace” has aged into a classic, and the voice that made Buckley such a sore thumb in the ‘90s has become immortal.
For instance, the film claims the members of Radiohead saw Buckley perform while making their second album, “The Bends,” and were so inspired that they went directly to the studio and finished “Fake Plastic Trees,” a song that established Thom Yorke as one of his era’s preeminent rock vocalists.
Less explicitly, Berg also crafts a portrayal of an artist in distress. Never a prolific songwriter, Buckley flailed creatively and suffered crippling self-doubt when trying to record a follow-up to “Grace,” and the erratic behavior in the final months of his life suggests there may have been more going on mentally than just a case of writer’s block.
Still, music from the aborted sessions for that album eventually appeared on the postmortem compilation “Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk,” despite Buckley’s wishes that the material never get released.
Had he lived to finish the record, he could have become a huge star or, just as easily, washed out of the industry, as so many talented people in his position end up doing. But most artists don’t sing like angels.