Directed by Amy Berg | 2025 | 106 minutes

★★★★★

Director: Amy Berg

Stars: Jeff Buckley, Mary Guibert, Rebecca Moore, Joan Wasser, Michael Tighe, Ben Harper, Aimee Mann

I began writing this post with the intention of reflecting on Jeff Buckley’s 1994 album, Grace. It is the only studio album released before his tragic death in the Wolf River, in Memphis, Tennessee. However, I decided to turn my attention to this instead — and I’m glad I did. Amy Berg’s fantastic new documentary about his life, which ultimately led me to tears.

There’s a slight ache embedded in the title of Berg’s documentary: It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley. The film doesn’t pretend to solve the riddle of Jeff Buckley’s life. It really dwells inside it. It examines the echoes, not just the epitaphs. What Berg creates isn’t a biography. Instead, it is kind of a séance — a gathering of voices, images, and music. These elements resurrect the sensation of Jeff Buckley more than the sequence of his years.

Berg’s subject is mythologized to near-untouchability. He is the radiant voice behind Grace. He was a beautiful young singer-songwriter who died far too young in 1997 at the age of 30. Yet she approaches him as something far rarer: a man whose contradictions were the heart of his art.

The Sound of a Life Remembered

Berg’s gift is her ear for the interior. Through rare archival material, we hear Buckley thinking aloud. There are half-whispered melodies being recorded onto a tape. Voicemails and interviews. There are stray fragments that sound like prayers. These are spliced between home videos. They include East Village Sin-é performances and glimpses of rehearsals. The distinction between performance and confession dissolves.

Berg reaches the familiar milestones. These include the Grace sessions, the critical acclaim, and the tours. She refuses to gild them with nostalgia. The performances are stunning, yes, but they’re also grounded in work and sweat.

Tim

Tim Buckley was one of the most adventurous singer-songwriters of his generation. He emerged from the Los Angeles folk scene of the late 1960s. He quickly transcended its boundaries. His music evolved from gentle acoustic ballads to wildly experimental fusions of jazz, soul, and avant-garde improvisation. His voice was astonishing and elastic. It shifted from a whisper to a wail. This range became his signature instrument.

Across nine studio albums, from Goodbye and Hello to Happy Sad and Greetings from L.A., he proved himself a restless innovator, always chasing new sounds and emotional truths. But his life was turbulent. He married young. He fathered Jeff with his first wife, Mary, who was just 17 at the time.

Then he drifted away. He was consumed by touring, experimentation, and ultimately addiction. When he died of a heroin and morphine overdose at 28, he left behind a legacy of brilliance. He also left a trail of unfinished connections.

Jeff was left with his 17-year-old single mom. “Jeff and I raised each other,” Mary says at one point in the film.

Jeff Buckley’s reaction to his father’s death was shaped by distance, loss, and a complicated mixture of curiosity and pain. Tim died of a drug overdose when Jeff was only eight years old. The two had met only once, briefly, before Tim’s death, and Jeff was not invited to his father’s funeral.

That absence haunted him for years. It was haunting because of the loss itself. It also haunted him because he never had the chance to say goodbye. He never got to reconcile with a man he barely knew.

The Women Who Knew Him

Previous films or documentaries framed Jeff as an ethereal loner. In contrast, Berg reframes him mostly through the women who shaped and sustained him. His mother, Mary, emerges as the film’s emotional anchor. She is a presence equal parts curator and mother. Her voice trembles with both affection and exhaustion. 

Berg expands that maternal insight into a broader constellation of female influence.

Rebecca Moore was an avant-garde artist who loved him during his time at Sin-é. She describes their intimacy with a mix of nostalgia and realism.

Joan Wasser, later known as Joan As Police Woman, speaks with gentleness. This gentleness softens the myth without diminishing it. Through them, we’d glimpse Jeff not as a tragic hero. We would see him as a man of immense tenderness, curiosity, and restlessness. He was someone capable of reverence and ruin in the same breath.

Between Heaven and Earth

Visually, It’s Never Over is gorgeous without being showy. Berg employs layered sound design, incorporating the hiss of tape, the hum of amplifiers, and the subtle breathing that precedes a note. This technique blurs the line between past and present. Animated sequences bring Buckley’s handwritten pages to life, ink blooming across the screen like a nervous system. It’s a stylistic gamble that mostly pays off. It is intimate rather than ornamental. This approach allows his words to float between the living and the lost.

The pacing, intentionally wave-like, mirrors the rise and fall of a setlist. Early scenes shimmer with youthful energy — Sin-é, the open-mic nights, the grin that precedes his first standing ovation. Midway through, the tempo slows – fame begins to constrict rather than liberate. Buckley’s journals, glimpsed in flashes, reveal a mind at war with itself: joy tangled with dread, devotion with exhaustion.

And yet, even in its darker passages, Berg avoids sensationalism. When the narrative reaches Memphis — where Buckley would ultimately drown — the tone is hushed, almost reverent. We see him happy, relaxed, laughing in rehearsal footage. The film fades not into conspiracy or morbidity but into stillness. Berg lets water do the talking. The Mississippi glides by, indifferent and infinite.

Crucially, the film corrects decades of myth. The coroner’s report, Berg notes plainly, found only one beer in his system. No drugs. No deliberate act. He was a young man at the cusp of a new era in music. He stepped into a river that didn’t give him back. He was singing along as Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (his idols!) played on a nearby stereo. He was sober and fully clothed.

The Voice That Remains

At its core, It’s Never Over is about sound. It highlights not just Buckley’s extraordinary range. It also explores the emotional frequencies beneath it. His performances of “Grace” and “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” still feel unearthly. Berg contextualizes them as extensions of empathy.

Jeff embodied feminism through empathy, emotional honesty, and a profound respect for women, redefining masculinity in rock. Berg notices his physicality closely. The way his jaw tightens mid-phrase captures her attention. He leans back from the mic as if to escape his own emotion.

The documentary’s emotional peak may not come in a song, but in silence. Ultimately, Berg plays a quiet voicemail — Buckley speaking to his mother, casually, alive, and unguarded. Then the image fades to black. There’s no swelling music, no montage of album covers, no “what might have been.” Just a voice, gone.

In that restraint lies the film’s power. Berg resists closure because Buckley’s art resists it. The title’s promise — It’s Never Over — becomes both thesis and benediction. Honest art refuses to end.

After the Silence

What lingers after the credits isn’t grief so much as gratitude. Berg gives Buckley back to the world not as a saint or a sacrifice. He returns as an artist in flux — flawed, searching, and luminously human. She restores the texture of his days: laughter, obsession, loneliness, the quiet work of finding the perfect chord.

If earlier documentaries, books, and fan lore built a shrine, Berg opens a window. The air that rushes in is tender and clear. Her film doesn’t tell us why Jeff Buckley mattered. It shows us how he felt about himself.

It also shows how he felt to those who loved him. It reaches anyone who’s ever listened to that impossible voice.

It’s a luminous, deeply humane portrait that trades myth for intimacy. You just must watch.

Chris Garrod, October 16, 2025

Buy it: http://www.magpictures.com/jeffbuckley/watch-at-home/

Stream its Playlist: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQO1ppY-iMZsHHkh1QamDz1bRxqbDV8Fr&si=-Dv0YWkw2VhHhsru