Documentaries

IT’S NEVER OVER: JEFF BUCKLEY

if you love his music you should see this, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about you should definitely watch it.

Caryn Rose

10 Aug 2025 — 11 min read

IT’S NEVER OVER: JEFF BUCKLEY is a new documentary, out in limited theatrical release (you could probably still see it somewhere especially if you’re in a large city). I have never been so eager to see a film while also being afraid of whatever emotions were going to present themselves. There’s no way for me to write about this on assignment anywhere because I am too emotional about it and I decided to stop trying to take that part out and just write this instead.

I’ve had the screener link sitting in my email box for a couple of weeks now and just could not face it, and almost bailed on seeing the theatrical release for the same reason. But I felt like seeing it in a room with other humans would probably be better for me than watching it at home with the cats and I’m very glad I took the leap of faith. I am here to tell you that if you love his music you should make sure to see this, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about you should definitely go find it.

Do you have a memory of the first time you heard Grace, Buckley’s first record? I remember I was so stunned when it finished that all I could do was hit the play button again. And again. And again. Where did this even COME from, how did we not know about this voice before this moment, how could it have existed for as long as it did and we didn’t know. I wasn’t writing seriously then, not really, so I didn’t have to figure out how to describe it. I just had to listen.

But when I was driving to Ann Arbor in the late afternoon on Saturday, heading out to see the documentary, I tried to think about how I would try to describe it now. Jeff Buckley’s voice sounds like falling in love, like an audible euphoria, it would smell like the surprise sultriness of night blooming jasmine and if I had to give it a color it would be a dark lilac, it feels like purple velvet and as open and endless as looking at the stars in dark sky territory. It made -- it still makes -- me homesick for some kind of past life or alternate universe where this is one of the soundtracks.

Consider, will you, that three song run that opens the record, “Mojo Pin,” “Grace,” “Last Goodbye.” If I’ve listened to Grace 1,000 times I’ve listened to “Last Goodbye” 1,000,000 times, most of it was as a soundtrack to a breakup or as the hype music to make me accept an end. I am sure I am not the only person for whom this is true but that doesn’t make it any more precious.

Kiss me out of desire, babe, not consolation

OH MY FUCKING GOD.

He wrote that line and then sang it with a voice that felt like a newly sharpened sword, honed so well it just sliced through your heart with the slightest of effort. Then the strings, then the rhythm section heavy and weighted, holding us all to the ground. Just those three songs and we’d be talking about him forever.

But that’s before the lyrics or the songwriting or the Verlaine-esque way he emoted through his guitar. The unexpected, perfectly tempered contortion of his voice on the chorus of “So Real.” The fact that he sang the only cover of “Hallelujah” that should ever be allowed (it’s because he understood what it was about)! Or how much “Eternal Life” is a fucking headbanger. Like, Jeff Buckley was always grunge-adjacent and he adored Led Zeppelin but I can imagine how annoying it must have been back in the day to be the subject of media trying to lump you into a genre for their convenience when your art was so many aspects of so many different things.

I lived with Grace when it came out, I was lucky enough to get to see him at Irving Plaza in 1994 and I didn't see him again when he came through Seattle because I was broke, I had just moved there, and I remember thinking, I'll just see him the next time.

Over the next decade, that record nursed me through multiple bouts of heartbreak like nothing else managed to. I remember how I just listened to the record over and over again because it gave me something to hold onto until I got to the other side, and the other because I wanted to make sure that I truly felt what bad shape I was in so that I would not make the same mistake again.

His songs give you so much room to be transported. You can just hold on and let it wash over you and you might not think you’re feeling anything but it’s impossible to listen to Jeff Buckley and not feel everything it is possible to feel. That is also why I put those records away for a very long time, but I let myself re-listen recently since I knew the documentary was coming out and my feelings on Grace have not changed very much.

I’m sorry, I know this is supposed to be about the documentary but I can’t talk about the documentary unless I can explain why it matters to me as much as it does.

I'm upstairs in the balcony, stage right

I ran into some friends at the theater and warned them that I was likely to cry the entire time, because I sat there in the 20 minutes waiting for the film to begin trying to psych myself up for the roller coaster ride of memories and emotions. It took a while for the waterworks to start (the appearance of Chris Cornell – whose friendship/fandom of Jeff I had temporarily forgotten – was the first trigger) but there’s also this anticipatory grief sitting in your body because nothing will change the ending of this film.

From the snuffles I heard all around me, I was definitely not the only one dealing with strong emotions, but also? Almost everyone interviewed in this movie -- his former partners, his former bandmates, even various music biz honchos -- cries or gets visibly emotional at some point. I might not have gone to see it on this particular Aquarius full moon had I thought about it a little bit more but then again, what the hell, the world is burning around us anyway. Let us FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS. That is something that music does for us and it was definitely something that I have turned to Jeff Buckley’s music for in the ensuing years. He was one of those artists who was able to vocalize endless nuances of emotion.

What I think is particularly remarkable about this film is that Amy Berg manages to tune it to the exactly correct emotional frequency for Jeff and his friends and loved ones and colleagues and for the people who are the target market to watch this movie. It’s sympathetic but it doesn’t let anyone off easy. It’s unabashedly emotional, everybody’s defenses are down, it is so real and so personal. There is no irony here but there is plenty of humor because Jeff Buckley was also fucking hilarious.

Like most of you, I did not get to see him at Sin-e, the bar/cafe in the East Village where Jeff started playing, and yet, there is footage of this. This will sound obvious but once again, the miracle that someone (photographer Merri Cyr – that footage from Irving Plaza was her, you can hear them saying ‘See you later, Merri’.) was there in those days and was trusted enough to capture all of this is just such a gift.

Jeff and the band were on the road for three years for Grace, so there’s probably no shortage of film from that time period, but all of that pro-shot footage would be expensive to license and also less interesting. It would have felt like a MTV Behind the Music instead of this intricate story of an artist’s life. Unlike far too many music documentaries, it doesn’t just run live clip after live clip. There is an actual narrative and you can feel the film moving along and telling a story.

Back to Sin-e. Here, the East Village in the 1990’s is the star, the people hanging out on the sidewalk just to be able to hear him play. There’s no voiceover or narration in this film, that would have been entirely too impersonal. So what you see is the small space and Jeff playing and then there are the people on the sidewalk and then this miniscule room (which you understand at this point because Berg shows you) suddenly requires a doorman with a clipboard. (It reminded me of Roberta Bayley a few decades earlier telling Clive Davis a dozen blocks as the crow flies from Sine-e that yes, she knew who he was, but that meant she knew he could afford the $5 cover charge.)

Unsurprisingly the major record label put pressure on the artist to make a new record while also wanting the artist to be on the road promoting the record. Aimee Mann, who was a friend of Jeff’s, notes that this is by design, because the record label never wants you to earn out, it’s designed to keep you ensnared. There were drugs, there was alcohol, there are the moments at which a musician realizes that getting to do the thing they love to do more than anything else is going to require more than you realized you were going to be required to give beyond your art.

The movie does use a fair amount of animation, as seems to be a trend these days, but I am happy to report that it is used judiciously. The cartoon accompanying Ben Harper’s story about watching Jeff hanging off the scaffolding so he could get the full body impact of hearing Robert Plant and Jimmy Page playing together is hilarious. But there was no point in the documentary that you wanted to cringe from over-use of animation.

I was thinking about what this film might seem like to people who don’t know a lot about Jeff Buckley, the kind of people who will flip to this when it gets added to streaming services and end up watching it because they like music documentaries. Will those people understand who Jeff Buckley was and why he was important? I absolutely think that Berg achieves this while also (I think) trying to explain why he died. When we finally get there, you will realize how many of the threads you’ve been following all lead you to the same place.

I envy the people who don’t know a lot about Jeff Buckley because they will not instantly get a knot in their stomach when the film cuts to the outside of Jeff’s house in Memphis. One of my pals asked me afterwards if I was okay and I said, “I mean, I knew how it ended.” And that has to be a particular challenge to a filmmaker, to figure out how much time you give to this, you don’t want to spend too much time on how he died vs how he lived and what he did while he was alive.

But Memphis means that eventually there’s going to be a shot of the river. I remember reading that Rolling Stone cover story about Jeff’s death and thinking about how terrible it all seemed, it seemed bigger and darker and scarier and while it is still of course very terrible in the film, it’s hits differently because it is not sensationalized. He had one beer in his system.

Once again the film is having me (and maybe you) facing the same questions I had when we heard the awful news. What did he think he was doing? Did he just think he was jumping in for fun? WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN THE WATER, JEFF? You wish you could yell at the screen and he would hear you. His band were on a plane bringing them to Memphis to work on the next record. He recorded demos and sent copies to his bandmates. This is not the behavior of someone who is planning to end their life.

On the other hand, he’d spent the last few weeks before he died calling everyone he cared about and telling them that he loved them. And as multiple people in this film discuss, brain chemistry is a bitch and we barely understand it now and we did not understand it then; add to that mix drugs and fame and alcohol. I am grateful that this document exists that does not sensationalize anything about it. It just tells the story as it happened.

I drove home under that gorgeous full Sturgeon Moon with Live at Sin-e at full blast. I hadn’t listened to that record in a couple of decades. This movie is going to make people listen to Jeff Buckley again, either for the first time or listen anew. It keeps him alive, it gives his friends and loved ones the space to tell their stories about him, it keeps his work in our consciousness. That’s exactly what a great documentary should do.

Hello newsletter pals. I have been neglecting this space because of my column at Salon and the weekly posts for my Springsteen newsletter, where we are doing the deepest of deep dives for the 50th Anniversary of Born to Run. But then I have been going to shows that I'm not on assignment for and writing long posts for Instagram when I could just come over here and write for you and not give more money to Meta, so I promise I am going to start doing that here again.

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