Perhaps it was the chill of the Park City snow seeping through the theater doors or the breathtaking voice and visuals of Jeff Buckley pouring over my seat — but I had goosebumps the entire time.
“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 24, documenting the life and legacy of the musician Jeff Buckley. Through never-before-seen archival footage, interviews with loved ones, old notebooks of the artist and animated drawings, director Amy Berg paints a multimedia picture of the “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” singer’s life from early childhood to his sudden death at the age of 30.
Rather than opening on the subject himself, the film starts with a sit-down interview with Buckley’s ex-girlfriend, experimental theater actress Rebecca Moore. In the interview clip, she explains how she has been pigeonholed into “the girlfriend” or “ex,” leaving the audience to wonder where this story might unfold next. It follows with interviews from another one of Buckely’s ex-girlfriends, indie rock singer Joan Wasser, and Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert. Berg paints an intimate portrait of Buckley’s sensitivity through his relationships with these three women. “No one has ever loved me more or better than he,” said Guibert in the clip. Notably, it took Guibert 12 years to agree to the film.
It was a fitting introduction to a doc focusing largely on the singer’s close relationships. The film was structured through a seamless back-and-forth between segments discussing his music and his personal relationships — his father, mother, ex-girlfriends or bandmates. As the film oscillates between these two parts of the artist, it becomes ever more apparent that they are intrinsically intertwined. Wasser said, “He heard the whole of his person in his music.”
While the three women are seen in interview clips throughout the film, each one leads the discussion on a particular era of his life. Starting with his childhood, Guibert describes Buckley vocalizing along to music as an infant. Through his growing up in the 1970s and early 80s, audiences see the artist’s early influences from Judy Garland’s “The Man That Got Away” to Nina Simone to Led Zeppelin.
Guibert recounts a memory of young Buckley laying on top of the speaker as the sounds of Zeppelin reverberated through his body. Berg depicts this memory through digitized hand drawings that animate and shape shifts across the screen — a mechanism utilized throughout the film to show an almost psychedelic entering into the artist’s mind. Later in a 1995 interview, Buckley said “My major musical influences? Love, anger, depression, joy…and Zeppelin.”
The film then follows the star’s rise to fame through the East Village art scene of New York City. It begins with Buckley’s performance at his father’s — musician Tim Buckley — memorial service. After performing a rendition of his father’s song “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,” he left the service with over 60 business cards from music industry attendees vying to work with him.
The performance was also where Buckley met Moore. Her retellings give us an endearing glimpse into Buckley during his early career. “He was someone who drank up the world like a sponge,” she said. It is a treasure-trove of anecdotes from Buckley’s skit character Spinach The Cat to the short stories he wrote about their relationships, coining himself “scratchy fish” and her “butterfly.”
Archival footage shows Buckley’s come up with early performances at the East Village cafe, Sin-é. “I’m a ridiculous person, and you’re lucky you paid no money to see me,” he joked lightheartedly in one performance. However, it was not long before Buckley entered the “cotillion,” as he coined it, of record deals. He eventually chose Columbia Records after walking into the halls and seeing portraits of Bob Dylan and Miles Davis hanging.
Here is where the artist’s first and only album, “Grace,” begins to unfold. While the album became a hit internationally, it only had moderate success in the US at its release. In an era of ‘90s grunge, Buckley was described in the film as a “counterweight.” While Buckley now holds a cult following, it wasn’t until 11 years after his death in 2008 that his cover of “Hallelujah” hit #1 on the Billboard charts.
Much of the film follows his two-year tour of “Grace,” during which he met Wasser when her band Dambuilders opened for his show. Through archival footage, we see a boisterous Buckley alongside his bandmates. “I’ve never been bored on stage. I’ve never been dead,” he said.
However, Berg also delves into the darkness brought around this period in Buckley’s life. In the film, he was described as spiraling around the fear of losing artistic freedom. Among the pressure of his label, fame, and following up “Grace,” Buckley was weighed by his second album.
The film approaches its end with the tragic retelling of Buckley’s untimely death. As his band members landed in Memphis to record his sophomore album, Buckley tragically drowned in the Mississippi River in 1997. Again, the filmmaker then returns back to those he loved.
“His story really comes alive when you sit with the three main women in his life and hear their stories and feel their pain,” said Berg in her director’s statement. “The film starts and ends with them because you get to know him through his music and these defining relationships.”
The final scene shows Guibert listening to her son’s last voicemail. “I couldn’t get Jeff’s final voicemail to his mother out of my mind for years. It made me cry on many occasions, as it probably will for you,” said Berg. And that it did. It felt like a gut punch.
As the credits began to play over his performance of “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” it seemed that many were still holding their breath until the video cut to black, leaving the viewer solely with Buckley’s voice. The haunting song was coupled with sniffles from across the audience.
It seemed like a suited ending. I kept reflecting back to a quote from earlier in the film where Buckley said, “I don’t even want people to really think of me as a face or name or a body or anything, just the music because when I’m dead, that’s the only thing that’ll be around.” As I walked out of that theater, while I felt grateful for this newfound closeness to the genius behind the voice, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d have wanted this to be made.