Time has diminished none of Jeff Buckley’s brilliance.
The acclaimed singer-songwriter, whose lone studio album, 1994’s Grace, was released at the apex of America’s infatuation with the angst, fury and blown-out guitars of the grunge movement, is the focal point of It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a moving new documentary from director Amy Berg.
The film, which is screening Aug. 19-20 at Oak Cliff’s Texas Theatre, as well as Dallas’ Angelika Film Center, is a concise overview of a generationally talented artist, and one who died tragically young at just 30 years old, accidentally drowning in a Memphis river.
Berg’s film utilizes new interviews with family, friends, bandmates and loved ones, as well as cycling through prodigious amounts of archival material, including voicemails, drawings (which serve as inspiration for some truly gorgeous, animated interludes) and vintage footage captured at various points of Buckley’s life and career.
Contemporaries like Ben Harper and Aimee Mann offer insight and context for not only the man, but the effect of his art upon them and the wider world.
What’s most remarkable about the film is that, for all Berg brings to bear on peeling back Buckley’s defiantly elusive persona, the truth about his heart and soul lie not in what he said or did, but what he sang. It’s in the notes and melodies he composed: Berg also provides ample helpings of Buckley’s impossibly beautiful, multi-octave lyric tenor, wrapped around everything from Bad Brains to Edith Piaf.
An artist as inspired by Judy Garland as Led Zeppelin clearly embodies a tension between his feminine and masculine impulses. Berg, along with several interview subjects, such as Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, and girlfriends Joan Wasser and Rebecca Moore, delves into this dichotomy, drawing an explicit contrast between the loud, macho music industry in the mid-1990s and Buckley’s tendency to go soft and thoughtful when others might expect loud and abrasive.
Buckley, whose somewhat estranged father, Tim Buckley, had achieved fame as a folk singer and activist in the 1960s and ‘70s before dying at the age of 28, had a palpable ambivalence about fame and how he and his music were being sold to the world. The haunting undertow of dread about the brevity of his own life, stoked by the fear of becoming like his father, only exacerbates his antipathy toward the music industry.
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley achieves what the great documentaries can do, endearing viewers familiar with the subject to rush over to their turntable and play Grace for the umpteenth time. For those less well-versed in Buckley’s life and music, Berg’s film is a wonderful introduction to a singular artist, whose work remains transcendent — its brilliance undimmed.
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(Fans should stick around through the final credits, as for a limited time, all screenings feature exclusive footage, which will only be available in theaters, of a previously unreleased, 26-minute Buckley concert from February 1994.)
“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” at Texas Theatre, Dallas. 7 p.m. Aug. 19-20. Tickets are $14.
Preston Jones is a North Texas freelance writer and regular contributor to KXT. Email him at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky (@prestonjones.bsky.social).Our work is made possible by our generous, music-loving members. If you like how we lift up local music, consider becoming a KXT sustaining member right here.
