Jeff Buckley died at 30. You already know that part. Drowned in the Mississippi River, wrapped in the kind of tragic poetry that rock stars used to specialize in before influencers replaced mystics. But Jeff wasn’t a punchline or a candlelight cliché. He was something else—something that documentarian Amy Berg has spent nearly two decades trying to define.
“It comes down to trust,” she says, explaining why her new documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley took so long to happen. “Mary [Guibert, Jeff’s mother] and I have been talking about it since 2009. She just needed to feel ready. There’s only one time this story is going to be told like this.”
And Berg wasn’t going to let it become a sanitized origin myth or a bootleg montage of overdubbed heartbreak. She wanted Final Cut. The real story. The voicemail messages. The devils in the dreams. The moms and the mistakes. The version where the voice doesn’t float above it all—it bleeds.
“I always wanted to incorporate the mother-son relationship,” she says. “I’m a mother of a son. I could relate.” Then, the twist: “It was right in the middle of Trump’s presidency when I finally got the rights. The Women’s March was happening, and there was Jeff in an old Canadian interview from ’95—speaking the same feminist language as those women. He was ahead of his time. He was the original feminist.”
Pause. Let that sink in. The same guy whose fans were once mostly “girls or gay guys,” according to Berg, is now being rediscovered as a prototype for emotionally articulate masculinity. A safe harbor for vulnerability. Buckley didn’t so much break the mold as quietly levitate above it.
“It wasn’t cool for guys to like Jeff Buckley in the '90s,” Berg says, half-laughing. “Now it’s empowering.”
The film doesn’t try to deconstruct the myth so much as tilt it, gently, toward something more human. Jeff isn’t the son of Tim Buckley in this version—he’s a kid who met a stranger once. “He didn’t feel like Tim Buckley’s son,” Berg explains. “He didn’t grow up with him. But eventually, I think he accepted that maybe the voice was the inheritance.”
In one brutal moment, caught in an old interview, Jeff shuts it down cold. Someone brings up Tim. His eyes flash: “The only time I think about him is when you ask me about him.” Next question.
Not exactly riding coattails.
“You can’t even really call him a nepo baby,” Berg adds. “He didn’t benefit from it. It just haunted him.”
So if it wasn’t Tim that defined him, what did?
Berg doesn’t hesitate: “His gift. That was the challenge.”
Jeff Buckley knew he was great. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he knew what greatness required, and he wasn’t sure he could survive the cost. He wasn’t an artist who embellished. He was a method actor who bled into the microphone. “It had to be perfect,” Berg says. “And those were his real emotions. He wasn’t making things up.”
For Berg, it was a challenge to even attempt a film that could carry that weight.
“I wanted it to feel like Grace,” she says. “That’s a high bar, I know. But I didn’t want to make a music doc that flattened the magic. I wanted people to feel what we felt in the ’90s. That mixture of pain and joy.”
To get there, she stepped away from the edit for months at a time. “We needed distance. Let it seep in. Like the way Jeff wrote—phrases percolating out of pain, joy, trauma.”
That idea of percolation rings a bell for me—I mention Chris Cornell and Euphoria Morning. Jeff and Chris were famously tight, spiritual brothers in a haunted genre. Turns out, Berg had just interviewed Alain Johannes for her next film, which is—yep—about Cornell.
“You just guessed it,” she laughs. “But yeah. Those two voices… there’s something there.”
She pauses. “Some singers become method actors when they perform. That’s what Jeff did.”
And maybe that’s why his songs still hit like they do. Why Grace charted for the first time in 30 years last month, slipping onto the Billboard 200 at No. 198 like a ghost sneaking through the fire exit. People still discover him. People still cry.
The doc touches every corner—Grace, the void of My Sweetheart the Drunk, the legendary voice mails, and those devil dreams that inspired “Witches’ Rave.” Jeff literally dreamt of demons. He dreamt he had a brain tumor. He wandered Memphis like a prophet with a broken compass.
“People on his street still talk about the ghosts,” Berg says. “You can feel it in the songs. It’s moody. Dark. But that’s what he was into. That was the space he was in.”
There’s a question that hovers over all of it: Is there a danger in explaining the magic?
Berg doesn’t flinch. “That’s why it took me so long. Because you’re right—if you show too much of how the sausage is made, it loses some of the awe. But Jeff worked for it. He wasn’t supernatural. He labored.”
And yet… some moments in the film say otherwise. The way his voice latches onto a Leonard Cohen lyric and rewrites history. The way “Everybody Here Wants You” feels like a confession whispered through a stained-glass window.
Even Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk—the unfinished, demo-like, posthumous mess—still glows.
“I didn’t get it at first,” Berg admits. “But once you start to understand where he was at mentally, emotionally… it hits different. I love that record now.”
So what about a biopic? His mom originally wanted that, and now that this version exists, the question re-emerges.
“I think it can be done,” Berg says. “People want more. There’ve been names floated.”
She won’t say who. But she namechecks Timothée Chalamet as Dylan and Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen—so the bar is high.
Big shoes to fill. Big falsetto, too.
Until then, It’s Never Over is the closest we’ve come to catching the uncatchable. A film that walks the knife’s edge between tribute and truth. A reminder that some artists don’t die young because they burned out—they die because the world was never built to contain them.
“He gave everyone permission to feel,” Berg says. “Even the punks.”
And then she laughs again, soft and sincere. “I think I finally got to say goodbye.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
