It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley Review: Tender, Not Worshipful

Is It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley worth watching?

Yes, with some reservations. It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is an affectionate, often moving portrait of a singer whose legend has long crowded out the person, and it gets closer to that person than any film before it. Amy Berg’s greatest asset is access: private recordings and candid interviews let Buckley and those who loved him speak without much mediation. The reservation is that the film’s shape is familiar, following the standard arc of the music biography, and it is stronger on feeling than on the craft of the songs themselves.

What is It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley about?

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a documentary about the American singer-songwriter who released one studio album, Grace, in 1994, and whose version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” became one of the most widely heard recordings of its era. Buckley died in 1997, aged 30, and in the decades since his reputation has grown far beyond anything he knew in his lifetime.

Berg, the Oscar-nominated director of Deliver Us From Evil and of the music portrait Janis: Little Girl Blue, traces his life from a complicated childhood, shaped partly by the absence of his musician father, Tim Buckley, through his years on the New York club scene and into sudden fame. The film premiered at Sundance in 2025. It is an American production in English.

Private recordings that let him speak

The film’s most valuable material is the most intimate. Home recordings, private tapes and informal footage give Buckley a voice that is funny, anxious, self-mocking and alert to his own contradictions, a long way from the solemn, angelic figure of posters and tribute concerts. Berg is right to trust this archive and to let it run, and the effect is disarming: for long stretches, the documentary feels less like a eulogy than a conversation.

The interviews with family, former partners and fellow musicians share that candour. Nobody is there simply to praise him. The people who knew Buckley remember his charm alongside his moods and the pressure of expectations, and Berg gives these recollections space rather than trimming them to sound bites. This is where the film best achieves what it sets out to do: it mourns without wallowing.

The music deserved more room

For a film about one of the most distinctive voices in 1990s rock, there is surprisingly little attention to how the music was actually made. The performances are thrilling when they appear, and the archive of live footage is a gift to fans, but the film rarely pauses to examine his range, his influences or the building of Grace as a record. Viewers hoping to understand why these songs still sound unlike anything else will get the emotion of the music more than its anatomy.

The structure is also conventional. Childhood, struggle, breakthrough, pressure: the chapters arrive in the expected order, and the film’s final movement leans on the grief its audience already brings. Berg handles that section with restraint, but it is the least surprising part of an otherwise personal film. At its length, a tighter edit of the middle stretch would have helped.

Who should watch It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley?

Longtime fans are the natural audience and will find new intimacy in the private material. Anyone who knows only “Hallelujah” will come away with a fuller sense of the man behind it, and viewers who enjoy music documentaries built on archive rather than narration will find it among the better recent examples. The film discusses early death, family estrangement and emotional struggle, all at a thoughtful, non-sensational level.

If the documentary leaves you wanting more stories about the cost of musical ambition, Whiplash is a fictional but ferocious study of what drive can demand from a young musician. For more character-driven films, browse our drama section.

The verdict

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a warm and humane documentary that restores a funny, restless, uncertain young man to a story that has too often been told as myth. Its conventional structure and thin attention to musical craft keep it from greatness, but for fans and the curious alike, the intimacy of its archive makes it well worth the time.

Rating: 3.8/5