115 min | PG-13 | July 1, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics
Leonard Cohen labors for years over a song his label does not even want to release. Decades later it plays at funerals, talent shows, and the closing credits of every prestige drama. The verses outlive the man who could not stop rewriting them.
Leonard Cohen spends years writing a song called “Hallelujah.” He fills notebooks with dozens of verses and discards most of them. Columbia Records rejects the album that contains it. The documentary builds itself around a single question. How does a song nobody wanted become the song everybody knows? The film braids Cohen’s life with the improbable second life of his most famous work.
Leonard Cohen appears in archival interviews as a man who treats songwriting as devotion and labor. He describes spending years on the verses and writing far more than he keeps. John Lissauer, the producer who first records “Hallelujah,” recalls the song’s creation with the ache of a collaborator left behind. Judy Collins remembers championing Cohen when the music business would not. Sharon Robinson and Larry Sloman supply the intimate texture of a man most people know only as a voice. Clive Davis brings the industry’s view of a song the business first ignored.
Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine direct and write the film with an archivist’s patience. They linger on Cohen’s handwritten notebook pages and let the camera read the crossed-out lines. The editing traces the song through its mutations from Bob Dylan in concert to John Cale’s stripped piano version to Jeff Buckley’s hymn. The structure follows the music’s spread rather than a strict chronology. The song itself carries the film’s emotional weight.
This is a film about persistence and the strange afterlife of art. The documentary treats Cohen’s discipline with respect rather than sentiment. The reverence is real and occasionally smothers the harder questions about why this song and not another. The structure stays conventional even when the subject invites risk. What survives is the song and the patience of the man who built it line by line.