Janis Joplin Bio-Doc Ten Years Later Janis: little girl bluedirected by Amy Berg with It's never over with Jeff Buckleya portrait of another fiery talent who died too young and left an influential legacy. Every fan (whether we were mesmerized by his music in the '90s or the romantic teenagers who discovered him via social media in recent years) has their favorite Buckley song. My oscillation between "So True" and "Grace," "Last Goodbye" and "Everybody Here Wants You." For Berg, her connection to the artist's music has her pulse racing throughout every moment of her new doc, which seems to be his take on Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" ” of Beyond the Cover.

It's a perfectly valid choice and a popular one, and it's Buckley's only number one song on A billboard Chart - In 2008, 11 years after his tragic death at the age of 30. But it also adds to the sense that, like many musical documents sanctioned by a family member who controls an artist's estate - in this case, his mother Mary Guilbert - this is a sanctioned version rather than a film that digs deeper or discovers new angles.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty here to satisfy anyone eager to delve deeper into the singer-songwriter's life and work, with a surprising range of four-chord sounds and a false pretense to match the mighty hard rocker Screaming heartbreak. He's a fascinating subject of archival interviews, many of the performance clips are noteworthy, the music sounds better than ever, and it's fascinating to hear Buckley's eclectic influences (from Judy Garland to Nina Simone to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan). interesting. Led Zeppelin to Smith; Bill Evans to Shostakovich.

He simplified things in a 1995 interview, saying, "My main musical influences? Love, rage, frustration, joy...and Led Zeppelin." Returning the compliment, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page ( Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant on Buckley graceBob Dylan, David Bowie and Morrissey too.

All of this is great stuff. However, for fans already familiar with Buckley's output and the mythology surrounding it, there may not be much new or revealing.

Berg is an accomplished filmmaker with both doc and narrative under her belt. She and editor Brian A. grace Released in 1994. but never endswith its doodly screen graphics, ribbons of "handwritten" text, and psychedelic effects, which seemed somewhat at odds with the raw emotion and longing of Buckley's music.

Documentation schedule so soon a completely unknown Underscoring the extent to which Buckley was a throwback, his early career trajectory echoed the origins of many in the 1960s New York City folk scene of the New York City folk scene thirty years earlier. Buckley first started diving for sin-é battles in the East Village, playing impromptu sessions for a handful of patrons who grew into a packed crowd that dispersed while Dylan made his way through the West Village's basement. door. The audience inevitably included record company executives, who were signed to Columbia, just as Dylan was in 1961.

Before his sins were exposed, Buckley's first public performance in New York was at a 1991 concert under the stars as a tribute to his father, rocker Tim Buckley, who played Jeff when he was 6 months old left Gilbert. After that, father and son met only once, a few days after Tim died in 1975 at the age of 28, months after a heroin and morphine overdose. Young Buckley was reluctant to participate in the tribute because he wanted to be understood through his own music rather than compared to his father. But Gilbert spoke of him.

Buckley's ambivalent feelings about his father are shown repeatedly in Berg's film. When an interviewer asked him what he inherited from his father, Buckley responded candidly: "People who remember my dad. Next question." In a poignant moment, his drummer graceMatt Johnson recalled Buckley, 29, saying he had surpassed his father.

Perhaps in an effort to keep the focus squarely on her subject, Berg doesn't linger on the parallels between Tim's and Jeff Buckley's deaths. The association drowned the latter mystery in Memphis' Wolf River in 1997, just as similarly comparable artists Nick Drake and Elliott Smith Buckley was preceded and followed by similarly untimely deaths. The romantic "too pure for this world" narrative is sometimes woven in favor of Drake, Buckley, and Smith.

Understandably, doctors want to distance themselves from drug-related deaths. rolling stones Select on Knuckles to omit this information from its coverage. He was known to dip into drugs, but was never an addict.

Still, many factors swirled around his death — the dark images of water and relapse in his lyrics that flooded him; the two weeks before nearly everyone he knew called him for it. His heartbreaking last message to his mother. The fact that he was wearing clothes that included boots was a factor that helped conjecture rule that the accidental drowning may have been a premeditated suicide. By not even talking about that school of thought, no matter how much it has been discredited, Berg adds that this is a strictly portrait.

Even so, the film's strength extends beyond its rich archival material to the personal nature of present-day interviews. The most notable of these is Guilbert, who freely admits that she is an imperfect mother but makes her love for her son very clear. There were also touching comments from ex-girlfriends including musician Joan Wasser and especially Rebecca Moore, whose emotional account said he ended his last phone call, saying: "Know that I love you."

Passionate fans of music idols always want their version of the story, which may be some of my nitpicky reservations about Berg's film. Perhaps for the explosion of music documentation in recent years there's a huge difference between quality and quantity.

Artists of Buckley's caliber - who at one point nicely described the music industry as being neither masculine nor feminine and having a liquid, watery feel that feels "very tidal-wave" - ​​will always instill a sense of ownership. . Anyone connected to music. never ends Probably not Buckley Bio everyone It was needed, but it was a stirring tribute that was full of heart.