Jeff Buckley's Divine Feminine
A new documentary about the 1990s star focuses on the influence of women and recasts the idea of the “muse.”
It’s appropriate that women open It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, and that women close it, too. The first documentary about the 1990s rock songwriter and guitarist, who rose to widespread acclaim on the lilt of his powerful falsetto until he died in the Mississippi River in 1997, the film relies mostly on the testimony of his mother, Mary Guibert, and two partners who shaped his work: Rebecca Moore, a child of Fluxus immersed in the experimental theater world of downtown NYC, and Joan Wasser, the violinist whose band, the Dambuilders, opened for Buckley on tour.
Buckley was enchanted by the music of women, a fact he spoke about frequently: raised on Judy Garland, with Nina Simone among his favorite singers, he referred to himself as a “chanteuse.” But as director Amy Berg’s film shows, Buckley circumvented the one-dimensional and negating concept of women as “muse.” He admired women as artists and humans, fascinated from an early age with the way women sing—a point underscored as the film opens on “The Last Goodbye,” a midtempo rock song that’s mystified and mesmerized me since I first heard it 30 years ago. His high voice vibrates with the spirit of gospel; in places, he belts like Patti LaBelle taking it to church. Though he paid homage, his songwriting was always his own, skirting hollow mimicry. (As he told Interview magazine in a tangent about Michael Bolton, “The thing is, I’m not taking from [Black] tradition. I don’t want to be Black. Michael Bolton desperately wants to be Black... He also sucks.”)
It’s Never Over is as emotionally raw a music documentary as I’ve seen: Guibert, Moore, and Wasser all hold their love and grief for Buckley close to the surface. That immediacy becomes especially apparent when Wasser describes Buckley meeting another of his favorites, the Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and her whole demeanor cracks from the fondness of the memory. Buckley’s sensitivity courses through the film, his embodiment of a different and fuller shape of masculinity—one unafraid to express the human range of emotions—apparent in both his work and his personal life. “All people are sensitive,” Wasser says in the documentary, “but his sensitivity wasn’t crushed like some men’s sensitivity has been.”
