This brisk, adoring portrait of the late singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley takes its name from a lyric off arguably the second most famous song on the one and only studio album he released in his short lifetime. That that album, 1994’s Grace, is still in the conversation thirty-odd years later as one of the greatest records of all time only confirms the title: We’re not done with Jeff Buckley.
But Jeff Buckley, tragically, is done with us: Though filmmaker Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil, West of Memphis) threads snippets of audio and video interviews throughout – his voice is present – and despite her intimate access to home videos, audio recordings, diaries, and more, you feel his absence – his lack of authorial voice. What emerges instead from Berg’s still-compelling documentary is the story of Buckley’s life as narrated and interpreted by those who loved him. That includes his mother, Mary Guibert, who got pregnant at 17 and raised him on her own when his father, the musician Tim Buckley, left the picture; two of Buckley’s girlfriends, who speak some to his depressive periods, which worsened alongside his skyrocketing success; and former bandmates and admiring contemporaries like Ben Harper and Aimee Mann. Interestingly, the talking heads feature a lot more women than you usually get in a music doc, and Berg makes a point to underscore that Buckley’s musical touchstones – in addition to Led Zeppelin and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – included Nina Simone, Diana Ross, and Judy Garland, influences you can hear in the heartrending way he unleashed an upper register keen.
In that he had a kindred spirit in Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell: The film poignantly points out the two were friends, in the process contextualizing Buckley alongside the grunge movement in a way I’d never really considered before. Another, surprise source of context is the near-constant animation that perfectly evokes the Nineties – a scratchy, hand-drawn zine aesthetic you’d recognize from late-night MTV or doodlings on the toes of your Chucks. The animation, credited to Animations and Graphics Producer Sara Gunnarsdóttir and animator Josh Shaffner, gives energy to the audio-only clips and gives the impression of insight into Buckley’s inner life.
An impression is ultimately all that coalesces in 105 minutes, and I wonder if that has something to do with how little the film engages with his songwriting. Given the trimness of his total output, I’d hoped for more drilling down into the songs themselves – the writing and recording of them, the meanings behind them. Maybe that supplementary material doesn’t exist, maybe Berg’s hands were tied to deliver a tight edit (the film will air this fall as part of HBO’s Music Box doc series), or maybe that’s just not the movie she was interested in making. Whatever the reason, it left me hungry for more. Then again, for Jeff Buckley fans, whatever it is, there will never be enough.
This article appears in August 15 • 2025.