“What do you think you inherited from your father?” a reporter asks superstar musician Jeff Buckley in an archival interview. His response is startlingly direct and tinged with melancholic inner conflict.
“People who remember my father,” he says, before turning to stare down the barrel of the camera. “Next question.”
If filmmaker Amy Berg’s new documentary, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” is upfront about anything, it’s that for Buckley, establishing his own musical identity separate from his father was life or death. Yet, as Buckley’s life unfolds, it becomes clear that singer-songwriter Tim Buckley influenced his legacy in ways that were both completely unexpected and wholly inevitable.
When Mary Guibert, Buckley’s mother, was pregnant with him, Tim Buckley abandoned them. Without his father in the picture, Buckley learned what it means to be a man from his mother. Ultimately, the most fertile new ground that “It’s Never Over” explores is how Buckley’s identity was defined by the women in his life.
Buckley’s mother serves as the documentary’s main voice, giving dimension to his life story in a way that only a mother could. Though Buckley is the focus of every anecdote, it’s her laughter, tears and pain that, more than anyone else’s, instill a sense of humanity in Berg’s film.
Guibert isn’t shy about how Tim Buckley’s absence impacted her and her son, explaining that the two of them essentially “raised each other.” Berg’s film recounts a lone week where father and son reunited, but it’s portrayed as a fleeting moment — a mere breath of Tim Buckley’s air that Buckley catches. Not long after that ill-fated week, Tim Buckley died of a heroin overdose at age 28.
Buckley wasn’t invited to the funeral, something that “kind of gnawed” at him; to make peace with that lack of closure, he sang at a 1991 memorial tribute concert for his father. Buckley’s performance of “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,” which Tim Buckley wrote about abandoning his wife and son, is accompanied in Berg’s film by an electrifying animated sequence which beautifully captures the blind stumbling feeling caused by loss without closure.
Though Buckley was determined to forge his own path, this performance ironically kickstarted his career, showing a small but immensely talented group of musicians what he was capable of. Performing his father’s material is what it took for him to get noticed — yet Buckley adamantly refused to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“I can’t tell you how little [my father] had to do with my music,” he said in a 1994 interview. “I met him one time when I was 8; other than that, there was nothing. The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.”
Even in death, however, Buckley struggled to escape the zeitgeist’s insistence on comparing him to his father. He too died young — an accidental drowning at 30 — but even three decades later, Guibert says, his family is dispelling rumors that it was a suicide or overdose.
Guibert’s relationship with her son, though incredibly close, was dysfunctional at times, and this reality is conveyed by Berg with admirable honesty. The harsh truth revealed by this occasional strain is that the pain of abandonment is often permanent. Buckley’s spontaneity and complicated emotional states are also discussed at length in interviews with two former partners, Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser.
Other interviewees, such as singer-songwriter Ben Harper, shed light on Buckley’s’s legacy, but Berg focuses far more on who Buckley was as a person rather than his brief but incredible musical career. Buckley was deeply in touch with what one could call, in the context of traditional gender norms, his “feminine side.” Just as influenced vocally by Nina Simone and Édith Piaf as he was by Robert Plant, Buckley embraced androgyny with the same vigor as greats like David Bowie or Prince, but with a style all his own.
If Berg’s exploration of Buckley’s identity falls short anywhere, it’s in the lack of information about his life between early childhood and 1991. These unacknowledged years were as formative to Buckley’s personal identity as his musical identity, and it seems a shame to overlook this period of his life in favor of more well-documented anecdotes from the peak of his career in the mid-1990s.
Buckley’s following has only grown stronger since his death in 1997, and intensely devoted fans will likely already be familiar with all the career beats hit along the way. However, “It’s Never Over” has more to it than meets the eye, and it paints an intricate picture of a one-in-a-million musician as something much more than that — a deeply nuanced human being.
