Stream It Or Skip It: ‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’ on HBO Max, A Documentary Love Letter To An Iconic Singer Taken Too Soon

“He was literally the best singer I’ve ever heard.” The testimonials from fellow musicians pour into It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a reverent documentary from filmmaker Amy Berg, which streams on HBO after its Sundance premiere earlier this year. Executive produced by Brad Pitt, featuring interviews with Aimee Mann, Ben Harper, Joan Wasser, Jeff Buckley’s mother Mary Guibert, and including exclusive access to the singer and songwriter’s journals, even revealing answering machine messages he left his mom, It’s Never Over is the film Buckley’s legacy has demanded, ever since he died at 30 from an accidental drowning in 1997.

The Gist: When Jeff Buckley put out Grace in 1994, it was both a culmination and a calling card. Bursting with a voice and vocal range that soared to heavens as much as it searched the corners of his soul, the record, with its mix of covers and originals, heralded the official arrival of a musician who’d already been wowing crowds and critics with live performances, most often at the intimate New York City venue Sin-é. Grace, with standout songs like “Last Goodbye” and his interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” plus the heavy touring that followed its release, felt like a showcase for a generational talent. But it was the only studio album Buckley would ever release.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley contextualizes the stop-start nature of the singer’s career. His talent, while enormous, was also un-classifiable by nineties music industry standards. Here was a guy who could channel Nina Simone and Robert Plant equally, and play guitar like a devil. But as artist and former romantic partner Rebecca Moore says in the film, while Buckley was someone “who drank up the world like a sponge,” the pressure to write songs, to fulfill contracts, was a psychological burden. And with the benefit of Buckley’s journals, which leap off the page with It’s Never Over’s use of animation, the film reveals the singer’s scattered, soulful, and yearning sense of himself. Buckley wrote about music like it was a woman, but also like it was a man. As if he was more than one gender. “Every human being has music that only they can make,” he wrote. But his craft, himself, was sometimes lost in translation.

Buckley, of course, was also the son of his father, the folk musician Tim Buckley, who left Jeff’s mother Mary Guibert when he was only a month old. In its interviews with Guibert, with messages he left her, and in speaking with other women in Buckley’s life, It’s Never Over establishes a feminist streak as a pillar of his identity. A sensitivity that drove him, made people become fascinated with him and his music. And crushed those same people when such a remarkable individual died too young. Aimee Mann says there was a “tidal wave-y” quality about Jeff Buckley. It’s a cruel irony he was taken by the water.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? “Hallelujah” is often considered Jeff Buckley’s signature song, even if it isn’t his. The 2022 documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song explores Cohen and his famous composition in nonlinear fashion. And thinking back to Buckley’s 1990s heyday also brought us to the recent doc Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, which features interviews with Buckley’s contemporaries of the era and celebrates Lilith’s women-centered, community-first focus. (It’s also worth noting that this movie is part of HBO’s Music Box collection, which also includes the Alanis Morrissette doc Jagged).

Performance Worth Watching: It’s Never Over makes tremendous use of animation, often viscerally so. The periodic sequences, designed and produced by Sara Gunnarsdottir, illuminate and electrify the quieter parts of Buckley’s life. 

Memorable Dialogue: Musician and former partner Joan Wasser remembers her first encounter with Jeff Buckley. “When I saw him, it was definitely a vibe.” She thought, “This person is too powerful.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: “His sensitivity wasn’t crushed the way some men’s sensitivity has been,” Joan Wasser says in It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, and sensitivity, as an emotion, really seems to have been the singer and songwriter’s primary driver. The film brings this notion to life so powerfully, through testimonials from his family, friends, bandmates, and lovers. But also because it has this rich, exclusive access to his creative, handwritten diaries and Jeff’s voice, calling out to his mom through an answering machine or voicemail. It truly brings him back to life, while it also fills in the mysteries about him that drifted undefined in the margins of his too-brief career. (Buckley used to use “Mystery White Boy” as his nom de tour.) Brad Pitt, exec producing here, was originally trying to portray Buckley in a biopic. Without passing any kind of judgement on Pitt or anyone who may have played that role, we think Buckley’s legacy is best represented through this documentary, because it defines him from the outside and the inside to present – finally – the full picture his untimely death prevented us from understanding. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley envelopes the viewer in the soul of its subject, a place that like his preternaturally beautiful voice was a source of his creativity. Maybe he lived in there too much; we’ll never know. But It’s Never Over is a proper tribute to his legacy.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.