It’s Never Over, the Jeff Buckley documentary, is unfortunately a perfect example of how to make a film about a fascinating artist feel…not fascinating at all. For a story as layered and complex as Buckley’s, this documentary skimmed the surface like a flat stone across water.
The first problem is straightforward: if you’re going to interview close family and friends, you need to offer viewers something new. Instead, the conversations added little beyond vague “he was talented and special” platitudes. We already knew that. Where was the insight? The deeper context? The substance that makes a documentary worth watching?
To make things worse, some of the most important parts of Buckley’s story were almost completely ignored. The controversy around “Forget Her” being forced onto Grace never arose. His “punk phase”—a whole chapter of his life that shows the variety of his artistry—was reduced to a blink-and-you-miss-it two-second clip. It felt like the filmmakers were more interested in hitting the internet bullet points than exploring Buckley’s life.
And then there was the music. Or rather, the same music. The documentary cycled through the same five songs on repeat as if Buckley only recorded a handful of tracks in his career. For someone who left behind such a varied and emotional body of work, it’s baffling that the documentary about his life felt like a broken record.
Visually, things weren’t much better. The graphics might have been considered cutting-edge if this premiered at a film festival in 2014 and had been submitted by a particularly ambitious 15-year-old. Instead, in 2025, it came off as dated and uninspired. I half expected an editor’s watermark to pop up in the corner.
The advertised “unseen footage” also turned out to be a bait-and-switch. Yes, there were clips we hadn’t seen before, but they boiled down to long stretches of Buckley singing. Don’t get me wrong, his voice was wonderful—it could carry nearly anything—but the recordings themselves were low quality, poorly edited, and unnecessarily long.
Despite these challenges, nothing was as disappointing as how the film breezed over the making of Grace. The documentary practically suggested he sang a few covers at some gigs, played his father’s tribute show, and just like that, an iconic album was born. No real exploration of the creative process, no nuance—just a quick overview and nothing more.
In the end, It’s Never Over managed to make a film about Jeff Buckley feel oddly empty. A story brimming with passion, music, and heartbreak was stripped down to the most obvious beats, leaving audiences with something that felt less like a tribute and more like a high school project.For a film that claimed to celebrate an artist who hated being boxed in, It’s Never Over did exactly that: put Jeff Buckley in a box, sealed it shut, and replayed the same five songs until the credits rolled.
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