There is an old idea that art needs a regular life to grow. Daily routines. Small rituals. Time alone that no one writes about. Jeff Buckley once said something along those lines, and it sits at the center of Amy Berg’s stirring film about him. The trouble is, nothing about him was ever quite regular. From the moment he released Grace, that first record that so many people still speak about in reverent tones, he was lifted into a space where the air is thin. People looked at him the way they look at a comet. Beautiful, rare, and a little bit terrifying if you were the one doing the burning.
Berg tries to bring him back down to street level. That is where the heart of her movie lives. Not on the stage, although there is plenty of that, but in the rooms where the people who loved him most try to make sense of a life that seemed to rush past them. Mothers, partners, friends, the kind of witnesses who remember what he looked like when he laughed because something silly happened in a kitchen. Those are the voices that carry the story, and the choice matters. It keeps the film close to the person instead of the idea.
There is a quiet bravery in this approach. Many music documentaries lean on glossy lists of admirers or distant insiders. Berg steps around that. She trusts the people who knew him, who worried when he did not call back, who saw him after a grueling rehearsal or a bad interview. The film unfolds like a conversation in which every story is a small rescue. Here is the boy who loved his mother. Here is the young man who did not want to become a shadow of a father he barely knew. Here is the singer who could bring a coffee shop to a breathless hush with a single note and then joke about it later because the attention honestly made him squirm.
The father is part of it, of course. Tim Buckley was a figure of romance for another generation, a name in record collections, a promise cut short. Jeff knew that story from the outside. He met him once. Imagine being a child and feeling that ache, like trying to hug smoke. He learned early how to push against a legacy that did not belong to him. The film spends time with that bruise without turning it into a showpiece. It shows how he held on to his mother. How he built room for himself by saying no to what felt borrowed. I kept thinking about how grief for a parent and the refusal to be defined by them can sit in the same hand. That push and pull shaped everything. Not only the music, but the way he moved through rooms, the way he chose people and let them choose him.
What is striking is that Berg never traps the story in just psychology. She loves the craft too, and it shows. She remembers to ask what it felt like to work. The film recalls the friendships with other artists who recognized the raw charge in his singing. You can feel the jolt he gave people like Chris Cornell. You can see how someone like Thom Yorke took in a performance and went home altered, so lit up that new songs poured out of him. Those stories do not feel like name drops. They feel like the natural overflow from a performer whose voice carried a kind of permission. Go deeper. Risk more. Sing as if you are standing on a cliff and the ocean is listening.
He got to share space with some of the people he had studied like a student who never stops listening. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Robert Plant. Moments that for any young artist would be life markers. Those scenes land with a startling clarity because you can almost see the boy and the scholar in him stand up at the same time. Then there is the fact that David Bowie once called Grace the best debut album he had ever heard. If you were twenty something and heard that from David Bowie, what would you do with that weight. The film lets that question hang in the air. It becomes another layer in the story of the second record that did not have the mercy to be just another album. It had to answer a myth even as the person who made the first one was still trying to decide what tomorrow should sound like.
The pressure is a character too. It is not the caricature of pressure that films sometimes sell. It is quieter. A kind of constant hum that never lets you rest. The movie listens to the people who watched him carry it. That is where the idea of ordinary life comes back in. Fame is a strange substitute for the patterns that keep a person steady. It does not cook dinner for you. It does not make sure you rest when your body is frayed. It certainly does not listen without wanting something in return. The film knows that, and in its best moments it seems to go looking for the scenes that could have saved him from the acceleration that came with being everybody’s next great hope.
When the film turns to his time at Sin e, the small room where he became an open secret before he became a phenomenon, it slows down just enough for you to feel the chair under you. Those nights were alchemy. You can hear it in the recordings that survived, hours of them, the kind of material that lets you track the evolution from talented to undeniable. There is something about a coffee shop audience that is ruthlessly honest. They will keep talking if they are not moved. They will look up from their own lives only if a song makes them. He learned to hold them with that elastic voice, that uncanny mix of delicacy and ferocity. The film puts you in that room again. I wish it lingered even more. There are stretches where the pace picks up and the editors throw on visual flourishes, animated words and graphic choices that feel a bit louder than they need to be. The voice is enough. His phrasing carries more electricity than any on screen text ever could.
Still, the film does not stumble over those choices. It finds its legs in feeling. It is what I would call a cradle to grave story in the basic sense. Childhood, early shows, the album that changed everything, and the end that still hurts to say out loud. But there is a pulse under it. You sense how much the filmmaker cares. You sense how much the people speaking to the camera still carry him with them. That kind of devotion does not show up in every project. It asks for patience. It asks that the crew sit around for hours while someone decides whether they can tell a story without breaking open. And then they do, and the room gets very still.
Something else I kept noticing. The film respects his discomfort with celebrity. It even has fun with it. There is a playful streak in the sections that remember how he reacted to splashy lists and glossy magazine labels. Most Beautiful People and the rest. He could be self conscious about that in a way that makes you like him more. It was not false modesty. It was a genuine unease with being turned into a picture on a page that had nothing to do with the way he sang or wrote or listened. Berg lets us laugh with him there and then moves on. She does not punish him with her attention, which is a risk with subjects who did not ask to be made into icons.
What I loved most is the decision to center the women who shaped his days. There is a gravity to a mother’s voice that cannot be faked. There is a complicated truth in the memory of a partner who admired him and also had to live with the parts that were messy. A lot of films go looking for greatness only in the stories told by gatekeepers who caught a glimpse of it once. This one asks for the cost and the blessing from the people who stayed. They do not turn him into a saint. They remember the tenderness and the impatience. The way he could surprise you with a joke right after a song that left the room undone. The film breathes better because of that. It has a lived in feel.
The love story here is not a single romance but a web of them. Love for music as a language. Love for a mother who worked hard to raise a son that the world would later try to claim. Love for a group of peers who understood what it means to risk falling on your face in front of strangers and who cheered anyway. And then the love that refuses to evaporate after a goodbye. The title of the film speaks to that stubbornness. For the people who were touched by him, it is not over. I do not think it can be. That is the strange bargain we make with art and with each other. You carry me for a while. I will carry you when I can. The weight shifts, but it does not vanish.
Grace remains a marvel, and the movie is honest about the shadow it cast. The record has that uneasy glow of an arrival that feels like a destination. What comes after. How do you make choices with a chorus of expectations humming in your ear. The film does not pretend to have a neat answer. It lets the tension stand. It is respectful that way. You see sketches of the path forward, some hints of where he wanted to go musically, and you also see the realities that complicated those hopes. The story would be flatter if it pretended a second act had already formed itself.
Berg’s tone is neither worshipful nor cold. She is affectionate and she is curious. That balance is rare. You can tell she did not start with a moral. She started with a person and let the shape emerge from the accounts gathered. If there are moments that feel a little busy in the editing, they are outweighed by stretches in which the camera gives someone a long runway and they take it. The cumulative effect is of a life remembered from the inside out rather than the other way around.
There is a temptation to talk about influence as if it is a clean transaction. One artist hears something and then makes a new thing, and we trace a line. That is tidy, but it is not quite how it works. Influence is a tangle of admiration, envy, permission, and, yes, fear. He inspired the kind of awe that can make even a confident musician go home and question what they are doing and then try again with more courage. The film shows that not by lecturing but by letting great artists admit they felt it. I appreciated that candor. It made me listen again to what his voice did. How he could lift a melody until you thought it might fray and then bring it back to earth as if that had been the plan all along.
If the film leaves you with a single mood, it is tenderness. I do not know the right word for that soft ache that sits in your chest when you listen to a song that remembers someone you miss. The final minutes carry that ache. It is not a trick. It is what happens when people tell the truth about a person they could not protect from everything and whom they cannot stop loving. There is a line in one of his most famous songs about endings that still makes people gasp when they hear it live. The movie does not need to quote it. You can feel it. That is what I mean by tenderness. It has its own language.
I wondered once or twice if the film could have paused longer in the quiet places. Those Sin e reels are a treasure, and every time the movie lets one play a little longer, time slows in the best way. Maybe that is greedy of me. The story has a lot to cover, and the director makes choices. What matters is that the rhythm is guided by affection. You leave knowing more about how he sounded, yes, but also how he loved and how he tried to stay himself while the world was spinning very fast around him.
There is a part of me that thinks he would have looked away in embarrassment and then watched the whole thing alone and cried. He did not care for the glare, but he cared deeply about truth. This feels true. It does not put him on a pedestal he never asked for. It places him in the rooms where he actually lived. It lets those who were there keep him alive in the only way that counts, by speaking his name with warmth and clarity. The movie is generous like that.
Art always asks for a life to stand on. The irony, maybe the tragedy, is that the more extraordinary the art, the harder it can be to hold on to the balance of a human day. Breakfast. A phone call returned on time. A night without the echo of an audience in your head. This film honors the artist without forgetting the person who needed those simple things and did not always get them. It feels like a love letter to a complicated son, a complicated partner, a friend who could sing you back to yourself.
By the end, you do not just admire him. You miss him. Not in the abstract way that fans miss the idea of a voice they loved, but in the plain way that people miss someone they like. That is a fair measure of the film’s success. It makes the distance between the legend and the person a little smaller. It does not replace what was lost. Nothing can. But it gives a shape to the loss that you can hold for a while, and then put down, and then pick up again the next time that song comes on and the room goes very quiet without asking why.
I think that is what the best music films do. They do not argue a case. They keep a light on. They welcome you into a circle of memory and let you sit there until you feel ready to stand again. Amy Berg has made something like that for Jeff Buckley. It listens closely. It loves openly. It accepts that in matters of art and of grief there is no true ending. Only a deepening, and then another voice somewhere picking up the thread, and then another. It is never over. Not really.
