Sundance Doc Made by Superfan Unpacks the Legacy of Jeff Buckley

Last fall, 27 years after Jeff Buckley died, the singer-songwriter best known for his haunting cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” reached a surprising new chart peak. Propelled mainly by teenage girls using the track as the backdrop for their moody musings, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” a plaintive breakup tune from Buckley’s 1994 studio album, Grace, became the 19th most popular song on the TikTok Billboard top 50. “Ugh the OG yearner   ,” reads an appreciative comment on a black-and-white video of Buckley performing the song that has been liked 640,000 times. “Imagine getting a song like this written about you like  ,” reads one from another wistful admirer.

To older generations of Buckley fans, these youthful reactions are entirely understandable. “You hear that song, and you feel the most romantic feelings you could feel,” says documentarian Amy Berg, 54, who first had her own moody Buckley moment in the ’90s.

Several years before Buckley’s music found its appreciative new audience on social media, Berg began working on a film about the singer — It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley — which is scheduled to premiere Jan. 24 at Sundance. The film, which is seeking a distributor at the festival, relies on previously unseen footage and exclusive voice messages to answer questions about Buckley’s rocky childhood, his shocking death at age 30 from drowning and, in in-depth interviews with Buckley’s mother and ex-girlfriends, just what kind of heartbreak inspired the deep emotion of songs like “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.”

“There are probably hundreds of different Jeff Buckley documentaries that could be made with different narratives, but this is the story I chose to tell,” Berg says. “It’s the love story about the women in his life and how they affected him and how he affected them.”

Berg has a track record of hard-hitting, muckraking filmmaking — she directed the Oscar-nominated 2006 Catholic Church sex abuse exposé Deliver Us From Evil; the 2014 doc about child abuse in the entertainment industry, An Open Secret; and the 2019 HBO true-crime docuseries The Case Against Adnan Syed. But the Southern California native brought to this project her experiences from an earlier career in the music industry. Prior to working in news and documentaries — and before making a 2015 doc about Janis Joplin — Berg was a booking agent at Long Beach-based punk-rock label SST records in the early ’90s; a band she managed, 16 Horsepower, opened for Buckley at The Fez in New York. “His songs got me through every difficult moment in my 20s,” she says of Buckley.

Buckley’s father, musician Tim Buckley, died of a heroin overdose when Jeff was 8, and Jeff was raised by his mother, Mary Guibert, who has been the keeper of his archive since his death. Like Guibert, Berg is also a single mom to a son, and hers was born in 1997, the year Buckley died. “I was so caught up in it,” Berg says of Buckley’s disappearance in a river in Memphis and his discovery six days later. Buckley’s autopsy showed he had just one beer in his system, and his death was ruled an accidental drowning, but a perception of mystery around it has persisted. “I was very much aware of not knowing what happened and wanting to know more,” Berg says.

The documentarian first reached out to Buckley’s mother about making a film about him shortly after she made Deliver Us From Evil. “Every time I finished a film, I would call or email Mary and say, ‘Are you ready yet?’ I wanted final cut, so I needed her to trust me.”

In the summer of 2019, after about 15 years of Berg asking to make a Jeff Buckley documentary, Guibert finally said yes to her. “She wants to make sure that the story gets out while she’s still here,” Berg says. Guibert, who had Buckley when she was just 17, had saved a trove of long voicemails Buckley left her, which became the key that unlocked the film for Berg. “I would cry,” Berg says. “I would listen to these long voicemails that he left to his mom, and it just moved me. He had to look after her a lot, and you could feel how they grew up together in a way.” Before bringing the film to Sundance, Berg screened it in her living room for Guibert. “There’s no gloss over her narrative at all,” Berg says. “It’s a real picture of a mom who had flaws and did her best and has regrets.”

The title of the film, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, is borrowed from a lyric in “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” and is intended in part as a reference to Buckley’s ongoing fandom.

Says Berg: “I wanted to speak to him in the title: ‘We’re still here, we’re still rooting for you.’ ”

This story appeared in the Jan. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.