Film
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man
PG-13, 98 min. Opens Friday at the BelcourtFans of Leonard Cohen should know in advance that Lian Lunson’s documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man isn’t really a biography, nor is it a Cohen concert film. It’s mostly a record of an event: an Australian tribute concert conceived by producer/musicologist Hal Willner, featuring Cohen covers performed by the likes of Nick Cave, Beth Orton and Rufus and Martha Wainwright. And those performances aren’t always presented in full. Lunson often cuts away from the songs for interviews with the singers, who talk about the ways they’ve encountered and embraced Cohen’s music, and how his snowy sound and deep, dark voice suggest a mystery that they’re still trying to solve.
That’s not to say Cohen doesn’t appear in I’m Your Man. Instead of gathering the usual and-then-I-wrote-“Suzanne” biographical info, Lunson films the craggy Canadian reflecting anecdotally, and sometimes allusively, on his career. But it can take a minute or two for someone who’s not a Cohen worshipper to realize that the long story he’s telling about having sex with Janis Joplin is his way of introducing “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.” Similarly, Lunson refuses to identify the performers and interviewees after naming them all in the opening credits: come late, and you’re lost.
Cohen has always been an acquired taste even among music buffs. Though his songs are often dense with striking, imagistic lyrics and a pervasive sense of doom—and those are the funny ones—his smoky deadpan croak can make even his wittiest lines sound dour. It’s unlikely that the Mel Gibson-produced I’m Your Man will convert people who aren’t already on board. The captivating Cohen interviews are handsomely lit and shot, full of saturated color and stark shadows; but the concert footage, shot on video, is haphazard and not especially dynamic.
The performances themselves are scattershot. Cave comes off like a lounge lizard singing the title song, and his version of the lovely “Suzanne” is mumbly and distracted. (Even Cave’s interview segments are surprisingly inarticulate, given the singer’s literary pedigree.) Rufus Wainwright scores two out of three times with his boozy takes on “Chelsea Hotel” and “Hallelujah,” though his tuneless tropicalia version of “Everybody Knows” is weak—not helped by the fact that he has to read the lyrics. Sister Martha, however, is spacily arresting on “The Traitor,” and she gives “Winter Lady” an extra chill when she sings it with the McGarrigle Sisters.
The problem with a lot of I’m Your Man is the disconnect between the interviews with Cohen—who sounds engagingly earthy as he talks about being inspired by comic books and the synagogue—and the testimonials of fans like Bono and The Edge, who make the singer-songwriter sound like the last great poet of the 20th century. But which part is out of whack? Hearing Cohen’s songs again in this new context is a reminder of the last golden age of lone guys with guitars and/or pianos, who sent out dispatches from their fractured psyches once a year in the form of 10 to 12 masterfully crafted pop songs.
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Given that, the star of this show is clearly Antony Hegarty of Antony & the Johnsons. He looks uncomfortable in his own skin while warbling “If It Be Your Will.” But he comes closest to Leonard Cohen’s spirit—at the very least, in the way he wrings something profound and angelic out of his own stark fear.