These days, who goes to a movie theater to see a documentary film – on a week night at that?

A lot of people, apparently.

Vancouver’s eighty-seven year old arthouse cinema Rio Theater was buzzing on a Monday night, and seemed all too happy to have us walk its ancient carpeted floors and receive us in its snug leather seats, which must fold every so often to give way to people entering the narrow aisles. It’s an eighty-seven year old tradition: walking sideways in movie theaters and muttering sorry in advance for the homicide of toes. 

At around 6:30, a swell of people arrives with their beers and popcorn bought from the lobby. Seats fold, toes are homicided, sighs as armrests are discovered and louder ahhs from further discoveries of cup holders on said armrests, pops are slid snugly there, then finally: a collective mirthful settling down as the great Kevin Bacon looms large and imposing in a police uniform on the big screen, barking at us to silence our phones or forever hold our peace.    

The movie trailers are fire. Desperately Seeking Susan (Madonna and Rosanna Arquette, both so young and radiant). Repo Man. Possession (how did Isabelle Adjani manage to look so beautiful and disturbing all at once?) Re-Animator (Herbert West has a good head on his shoulders…and another one at his desk!). Cult-classic cinema so absurd that it draws laughter all around. An appropriate starter for the main feature to come.

It’s Never Over – Jeff Buckley (dir. Amy Berg, Magnolia Pictures, 2025) opens with interviews of three women in the celebrated American troubadour’s short life. Rebecca Moore, Jeff’s first girlfriend; Joan Wasser, his last; and Mary Guibert, his mother and forever. They all share their memories of Jeff, child of an American singer-songwriter and a classically-trained Panamanian pianist and performer; the prodigy, who, by several accounts, appeared reluctant to recognize and accept his considerable musical inheritance, instead wanting to draw from the well that he could call his very own.

Ironically, it’s a rendition of his father Tim Buckley’s songs at St. Ann’s Church in New York in April 1991 that introduces Jeff to a wider circumference of industry people, including those who weren’t actually there but were nevertheless touched by his immense talent (like Robert Plant and Linda McCartney); an event that puts his life in close tangent with Rebecca, a performance artist and one who had actually been there and seen him perform. They fall madly in love and live together in the Village for about two years, by her account a good life until he signs a record deal with Columbia Records.

Jeff had long dreamed of becoming part of the illustrious Columbia Records roster (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, et. al) and paid the price in blood, sweat and tears, turning himself into a slave of his recording contract by embarking on a grueling promotional tour of his debut album. One evening, he’s back in NY playing another gig and Rebecca gets an invitation to come see him backstage at a very specific hour. She waits and comes to the venue as instructed, only to find the room empty. Jeff has left the building, and their life together, as he hurtles towards a different universe.  

Joan is the lady Jeff falls for at the height of his career, which runs parallel to the height that hers was at that time. She was the sought-after violinist, the riveting frontwoman of an indie rock band. Joan laughingly rolls her eyes as she recounts how Jeff would come to her shows and and pretty much stare her down into loving submission, but mainly she was sad and tearful in the docu. Later, my daughter told me that she had read up on Joan, and turns out that Jeff had proposed to her weeks before his death. No wonder she looked almost inconsolable. There it goes again: loving and leaving as a recurring motif in his short but brilliant life. “If only he had lived a little longer, he would have realized that everything fades, everything passes,” she shares, her voice quiet and sad. Jeff experienced things much more strongly than others. If only he had let some more time pass…oh what vinyl records of his we would all possess!

The docu reminds us of what we already know but don’t mind knowing all over again: his incredible musicianship – that amazing guitar playing technique cradling those gender-bending vocals, whose range in pitch, timbre and emotion remain unparalleled by any other male vocalist in rock music history except perhaps for Robert Plant; his uncanny ability to mimic any vocal, including Nusrat Ali Fateh Khan’s complex devotional singing that he performed in Urdu in front of the astounded qawwali singer, whose mind and zygomaticus facial muscles were blown, as their photograph together clearly showed: Nusrat looking every bit as much of a fanboy of Jeff as Jeff was of him.

Oh Jeff and his beautiful face, made even more haunting by a candid photo of him staring out into space, lost in a world that only he knew; that utter humility to recognize incredible music in others and lose himself in their sound waves (quite literally at one point, when he climbed what seemed like three or four storeys up the scaffolding at a Led Zeppelin concert to be closer to the thundering loudspeakers). And of course, his small but unforgettable cache of love songs forged mainly by heartbreak: just like the ocean, always in love with the moon. Union seemingly imminent until the last minute, when it ebbs away.  

His mother Mary shares the first and last time Jeff ever spent with his father, when he was eight. And then: an image of a paper match box on which Tim had written down his phone number for Jeff to call. That call, though never made, seems to echo in all of Jeff’s plaintive music. That longing to call and be called upon was primal, subliminal, sublime. It was, and remains that way, to our eternal guilty pleasure, as we listen to his anguished vocals over and over on our headphones.

Mary was only eighteen when he became a mother to Jeff. Tim had left her months before to pursue his own dreams, leaving her literally holding the bag. She too had her own dreams, but decided to bring her child into the world first. She recalls how Jeff was already vocalizing in perfect pitch even as a baby, clearly destined for a life in music, and how she would need to somehow manage being a mother to him without a husband by her side.

Mary’s story is what makes the final scene so devastating, especially to the women in the audience, myself included. Throughout the almost two hours of interviews, we meet and hear about Jeff from fellow musicians, friends, and friends plus (he and Aimee Mann had shared something wonderful, apparently). We are reminded that after seeing Jeff’s performance, Radiohead went straight to their studio and recorded Fake Plastic Trees. But most of us don’t know a whole lot about Jeff as Jeff Scott Moorhead, the son of Mary, the little boy that had to grow up at the same time as his very young mother. Instead of sadness and regret over having been born, Jeff only carried gratefulness in his heart for the person that allowed him to live, and he poured this heart out in one final voicemail before he lost himself one last time to the waves of the Wolf River in Tennessee. It was so powerful that even when the credits rolled, I could still see at least one woman in the audience with her head on her hands, weeping.

Amy Berg brings a very intimate sensibility into her narrative, and where there are no footage, she expertly uses a combination of animation, image layering and sound design to immerse the viewer in that event in Jeff’s short life being described. Her technique is effective and makes the docu move faster than the almost two-hour run time. It’s Never Over is a great film about an old soul to see at an old theater in Vancouver, to remind oneself of something that my favorite comedian and philosopher, the late Norm Macdonald, had once said about dying: it’s not the person that dies, it’s the world that dies. Indeed, while the world of passionate young men making eye contact with everything and everyone around them seems to have largely disappeared, the voice of Jeff Buckley has only grown stronger, and in 2025, we are still listening.

Celebrating you on your birthday month, Jeff Buckley!