It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley: graceful documentary on singer songwriter Jeff Buckley separates the man from the myths

With booming androgynous vocals that could hit four octaves, the voice of the late rock musician Jeff Buckley left an indelible mark on pop culture. He combined soul, folk, shoegaze and stadium rock into an intoxicating witch’s gumbo; and his confessional songwriting found a way to bleed a strange romance out of existential dread (see Buckley’s 1994 song ‘So Real’), the harmonies sitting somewhere between Nina Simone at her most elevated and Leonard Cohen at his most dejected.

The legend goes that after seeing this artist live, Radiohead immediately hailed a taxi and rushed straight to the studio to re-record their song ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. But having released just one studio album, Grace (1994), before dying mysteriously at the age of 30, Jeff Buckley entered a pantheon of tragic artists – alongside Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, among others – who burned out way too young.

In May 1997 Buckley spontaneously went night-swimming in Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, doing the backstroke while singing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’; his body was recovered six days later. Was his drowning a tragic accident? Or rather, was Buckley a victim of suicide, living out the morbid lyrics of his posthumously released grunge-meets-Cocteau-Twins song ‘Nightmares by the Sea’? In certain corners of Reddit, they’ll be sharing theories on this until the clocks stop ticking.

The reason Amy Berg’s documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is such a triumph is that it detaches Jeff Buckley from the legends, instead showing the free-spirited man behind the music. With unparalleled access to friends, family and peers, including a refreshingly honest interview with Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, Berg depicts someone who never fully recovered emotionally from a distant father (the equally talented folk musician Tim Buckley, who died from a heroin overdose in 1975, just weeks after meeting Jeff for the first time). We learn that Jeff sang Judy Garland covers to deal with the pain of this rejection and, at high school, the other kids regularly called him a homophobic slur. He subsequently felt a deep distrust for male authority, and Berg’s film speculates that this influenced Buckley’s effeminate singing voice, his habit of wearing dresses and his ability to connect so naturally with women.

As a viewer looking at scribbles of Buckley’s diaries – including the line: “Will women ever outgrow the scars inflicted on them by men?” – you feel like a therapist making a breakthrough with a complex client. Stylistically, the way Buckley’s lyrics and notebook sketches flash across the screen – including abandoned artwork for an unreleased project, where he doodled Satan having sex, a metaphor for Buckley’s mistreatment by major label bosses – is similar to moments in Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015) and Brett Morgen’s Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015).

Like the subjects of those two documentaries, Buckley began to crumble under myriad fame-triggered pressures. Berg explores how the singer spent many months sleepwalking through life due to a second-album slump, even experimenting with ouija boards in his basement to try to find a solution to stubborn writer’s block. If there’s one weakness to It’s Never Over, it is its failure to properly interrogate the cliché of the good-looking, tortured poet.

All in all, It’s Never Over is a great example of a music documentary filling in the murky gaps and making a musician who has been eulogised to the point of exasperation feel more like a mere mortal. At the end of his life, Buckley was happy and drug-free, getting his band back together to finish off demos and finally ready to finish up his second album. You sense he was hitchhiking from one spontaneous experience to the next, whether that was making friends with elderly neighbours or applying to be a butterfly keeper at the local zoo. This was someone genuinely excited about the next stage of his life. It’s Never Over, then, should start to change the discourse around Jeff Buckley’s legacy from one defined by tragedy to one that is about celebrating an artist who lived passionately in the moment. In the end, you walk away from Berg’s enlightening film with the sense that Jeff Buckley waded into that water with a childlike smile on his face. Berg leaves no doubt this was a life well lived.

► It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is in UK cinemas 13 February.