In the years since Jeff Buckley’s shocking death at age 30 in 1997, his estate has sanctioned the release of 10 studio compilations, eight live collections, one box set, eight singles and five video recordings. In addition, there have been a rash of documentaries, produced in various countries around the world, as well as a dramatic depiction of him played by actor Penn Badgley in a movie whose title alludes to his musical father, Greetings from Tim Buckley. Collectively, that places him in the realm of other departed stars, including Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and Eva Cassidy, whose catalogues have been mined for every ounce of gold they can possibly produce.
In that context, the title of the new Jeff Buckley documentary, It’s Never Over, could easily read like a threat. Luckily, nothing could be further from the truth. The film winds up giving a largely familiar story a holistic reach like no project before it. However picked over the bones of Buckley’s story may be, director Amy Berg has found fresh flesh by emphasizing the crucial role women played in his life starting with his mother, Mary Guibert, and fanning out to various girlfriends, most of whom are fellow artists who sometimes doubled as spiritual collaborators. Together, they show how a female spirit not only shaped Buckley’s early life, it also provided a foundational part of his art. The earliest songs he sang as a kid were voiced by women, from Diana Ross’s yearning reading of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough to Judy Garland’s self-immolating take on The Man Who Got Away. “I wanted to be a chanteuse,” Buckley says in a vintage audio interview used in the film. “Secretly, I think I wanted to be Nina Simone.”
You can hear the connection in the intensity, range and sustain of his quaver, which also drew from the qawwali chants of the Pakistani devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. In the film, Buckley refers to Khan as “my Elvis”. At the same time, he drew profound inspiration from classically macho sources, initially through the scorched earth whomp of Led Zeppelin and, later, via the chest-beating yowls of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell. The breadth of those gender identifications allowed Buckley to idealize the Jungian concept of anima, which asserts that men have to recognize their feminine side in order to fully embrace their humanity, as well as to truly understand the role of women in their lives. In one vintage quote in the film, Buckley says, “I decided to make a woman of music and give myself to her. At another point, I decided to make a man of music and give myself to him,” adding for good measure: “Music was my mother. It was my father. It was the best thing in my life.”
That last line can’t be easy to hear for his actual mother, who co-produced the film and who guards his estate like a sentry, deciding who from his life can speak for him and who cannot. To her credit, Guibert allowed director Berg to cast Jeff’s early years with her in a far from soft light. She was just a teenager when he was born, the product of a fleeting relationship with the visionary cult singer Tim Buckley. At the time, he was on the rise (or at least seemed to be), and, in his ambition, he ignored both her and the coming child. Five months into her pregnancy, Guibert recalls in the film, “I knew I was never going to see Tim again.”
While Tim Buckley ran off to pursue his dreams, her ambitions of being an actor and musician withered under the responsibility of raising the child. She’s honest in the film about her own immaturity at the time, which meant that Jeff had to mother her in ways that came to haunt and anger him. The only time he saw his father was during several days they spent together when Jeff was a boy. His later attempts to reach his dad were ignored, then made impossible when Tim died of a heroin overdose at age 28 in 1975. Jeff harbored dark feelings afterwards, complicated further by the fact that music – his savior and muse – bound him inescapably to the man who abandoned him.
Jeff Buckley in 1994. Photograph: Dave Tonge/Getty Images
Jeff’s path to a career in music has been chronicled endlessly elsewhere and it’s dutifully recalled in the film. Yet seldom, if ever, has the story had as caring a context as the one provided by the friends and lovers who spoke to Berg. They paint a portrait of someone whose insecurities and neurosis ran in tandem with his talent and daring. When Grace appeared and artists of the order of David Bowie and Robert Plant fell over themselves to praise him in interviews, Buckley buckled under the expectations of their awe. He was just as itchy about his anointment by People magazine as one of the “most beautiful” men alive. A girlfriend in the film recalls him buying every copy of the magazine he could get his hands on so he could throw them in the trash.
Stark as the contrast may have been between his often ugly view of himself and the beauty of his outward appearance, there’s no denying the part it played in his myth. Like Jackson Browne, Buckley’s soulful brand of handsomeness ideally mirrored the sensitivity and refinement of his art.
The man behind that face is presented here as someone simultaneously confused and playful, sweet and lost. For a fresh insight, friends tell Berg they think he may have been manic depressive, a term given little airing back in the 90s, when Buckley died by accidentally drowning in the Mississippi River. Another coup for the film is the inclusion of voicemails he left for his mother, including one in which he excoriates her for her deficiencies and another in which he honors her perseverance and unwavering love for him. Despite that support, friends say Buckley had no idea how to grow into a mature man. As deeply as that vexed him, his melding of genders in his art allowed him to live his short life with the androgynous freedom of a child.
Today Buckley would be 58, an unimaginable age for someone whom fate has forced us to see as forever young. Now he exists solely on a plane he might well appreciate, where he’s less a person than a sound, a soul captured wholly in song.