A LAST GOODBYE

A docudrama about the life of singer Jeff Buckley met with a rapturous response at the Sundance Film Festival last week. Laura Barton hopes it could mark the end of the glitzy biopic

- Laura Barton

These are surely the gilded days of the music biopic. In recent months, we have watched Timothée Chalamet turn into a puckish Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Kingsley BenAdir's interpretation of Bob Marley in One Love, and Marisa Abela's take on the role of Amy Winehouse for Back to Black.

It is also not long since we saw fictionalised versions of the lives of Whitney Houston, Elvis Presley, Elton John, and Freddie Mercury. We have even witnessed Robbie Williams bafflingly play himself as a chimpanzee in Better Man. Still to come on the horizon: dramatised takes on the lives of Boy George, Billy Joel, Janis Joplin, Kiss, Linda Ronstadt, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, the Grateful Dead, the Bee Gees and The Beatles.

I am, I confess, not a huge fan of musical biopics. It has always seemed to me that something is lost in the enactment: the individual becomes untethered from the music itself; the essence of an artist and their music evaporates. Instead we are left with something proficient, impressive, but somehow largely unmoving.

In Amy Berg’s forthcoming documentary about Jeff Buckley, we find something moving happily against the biopic trend. Buckley was a fairly minor musical figure in his lifetime. It was only after his death, at the age of just 30, that his album Grace, and in particular his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, came to be celebrated.