Leonard Cohen, by his own description, can barely carry a tune. He sounds something like a Jewish Johnny Cash. His idiosyncratic music and dark lyrics defy conventional adjectives. But the sound, the words, the life and this documentary devoted to them are as deep and deeply riveting as the basso profundo voice.
Director Lian Lunson's "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man" captures the trinity of its subject - poet, performer, philosopher - in her seamless tribute, constructed of concert footage and biographical interviews.
I, and perhaps you, first heard his haunting music 35 years ago on the soundtrack of Robert Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." Cohen had emerged on the scene a few years earlier as a '60s counterculture icon on a par with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. His whispery way of speaking and singing and his long, longing lucubrations on love and loneliness were not destined for the Top 40 charts but had a big literary as well as musical influence on key artists who followed him.
Now 71 and reclusive, Cohen in his youth was a relentless ladies' man (his gently erotic artwork adorns the doc) but an evolving one - brutally honest, self-analytical and articulate. "I hated everyone but acted generously, so no one ever found me out."
Humility and introspection led him away from pop stardom and into serious Zen studies. He entered and spent years in a Buddhist monastery, becoming a monk himself under the tutelage of master Roshi - "someone who deeply didn't care about who I was." The corollary revelation, Cohen found, was that "the less I cared about myself, the better I felt."
One could go on excessively about Cohen the man, but the film does not. It goes on, instead, with sublime performances of his music from the "Came So Far for Beauty" gala concert at Sydney Opera House in 2005. The vocal all-stars include Nick Cave (singing Cohen's signature "I'm Your Man" and "Suzanne") and Beth Orton's version of the immortal "Sisters of Mercy."
Most magical moment is the perfect harmony of Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla in the soaring lyrics of "Anthem":
"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There's a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in."
Most soaring moment is the semi-final "Hallelujah," gorgeously rendered by John Wasser and sibs Rufus and Martha Wainwright. If this song doesn't give you religion, nothing will.
Speaking of religion, director Lunson's collaborative co-producer here was fellow Cohen aficionado Mel Gibson, with whom she produced "Songs Inspired by the Passion of the Christ" - a CD that, uh, is conspicuously absent from my collection.
The passion of Cohen represents a gentler, less dogmatic spiritual journey that often led to the edge of the abyss - but pulled back just short. He speaks of a beautiful scene in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna advises a great general: "You'll never untangle the circumstances that brought you to this moment. Embrace your fate." Lunson expertly employs that story as an intro for another eerie Cohen ode to the divine comedy, divinely sung by U2:
"You'll be having fun, baby, long after I'm gone ...
I'll be speaking to you from my window in the Tower of Song."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
