"Greetings From Tim Buckley"

Penn Badgely and Imogen Poots

I have a rather amus­ing, I guess, con­flict that made it ques­tion­able for me to write about this movie in a pro­fes­sion­al con­text, which is that a very dear friend of mine in real life is por­trayed as a char­ac­ter therein. Frank Wood, a stage act­or of good repute, por­trays the musi­cian Gary Lucas, who I got palsy pal-sy with after review­ing a show of his in the late 1980s, God help me. I was not present at the Arts At St. Ann’s con­cert that provides this fic­tion­al­iz­a­tion of a cru­cial point in the life of the late Jeff Buckley its cli­max, but I cer­tainly knew about it, and I was around Gary and Buckley a bit dur­ing the lat­ter­’s brief ten­ure in Gary’s still-extant banc Gods and Monsters. Dan Algrant’s movie jux­ta­poses scenes from the pur­pose­fully root­less life of Jeff Buckley’s legendary cult-musician fath­er Tim Buckley against a depic­tion of Jeff’s trip from California to New York at the behest of the St. Ann’s con­cer­t’s organizers. 

Movies about the broken bonds between fath­ers and sons are get­ting to be a thing with film­makers of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion nowadays, and Greetings From Tim Buckley is a rare one in that it did­n’t make me want to puke blood. In fact it is quite good, and one reas­on it’s quite good, in my book, is some­thing I’ve seen oth­er crit­ics give it a hard time about. The movie is con­tent to let its char­ac­ters breathe in their envir­on­ments, and do what they do, and it nev­er attempts to ham­mer a nail on which to hang their motiv­a­tions. Which isn’t to say it does­n’t give you dots to con­nect. But I was actu­ally fairly relieved, say, that the Tim Buckley depic­ted in this film (and nicely played by Ben Rosenfield) is nev­er obliged to sit down and deliv­er a speech about why he’s an absent­ee dad to his infant son. The char­ac­ter­’s beha­vi­or in an early scene, in which he detours into the desert on a road trip to a gig he’s likely to be very late for as a res­ult, does a pretty good job of encap­su­lat­ing the rest­less­ness that guided not just his beha­vi­or but his music. Similarly, the quiet exas­per­a­tion that Penn Badgely’s Jeff con­veys as every­one he meets in New York imme­di­ately tells him how much he looks like his dad and then ignores him is quiet, full of implic­tion. Hints are dropped here and there by oth­er char­ac­ters about the kind of music Jeff had been involved with in California, and its dis­con­nec­tion from the spacey, jazz-inflected folk that his dad pion­eered; but the feel­ings of ali­en­a­tion and even­tu­al res­ol­u­tion are con­veyed via the spaces the char­ac­ters inhab­it, and the spaces between them. In the vis­ion con­cocted by Algrant with his co-screenwriters, David Brendel and Emma Sheanshang, con­front­ing and then embra­cing the shad­ow cast by his fath­er becomes Jeff’s way of finally step­ping out from under it. The char­ac­ter­’s con­flicts get summed up pith­ily; while Jeff insists he can sing rings around his dad, there’s also the fact that at the age Jeff was when he turned up for the St. Ann’s con­cert, Tim had made some of his best and most endur­ing music. 

Once these points are estab­lished, Algrant takes his time. Imogen Poots’ con­cert­mas­ters’ help­er char­ac­ter ini­tially threatens Manic Pixie Dream Girl-hood, but her moody tent­at­ive­ness gives her a dimen­sion that plays well off of Jeff’s what-am-I-doing-here sus­pen­sion. Wood’s ver­sion of Lucas is that of a bluff show-me-what-you-got pro who turns quasi-mentor. There’s a neat bit where Lucas men­tions to Buckley that he should put a lick he just sang “into one of your dad’s songs” and Lucas registers the young sing­er­’s dis­com­fort; and the scene in which Gary plays Jeff the instru­ment­al that would become “Grace” is one of the bet­ter depic­tions of music­al com­mu­nic­a­tion I’ve ever seen in any movie. 

I haven’t been crazy about Algrant’s oth­er pic­tures (and I sup­pose it bears dis­clos­ing that the dir­ect­or and myself both acted in the same film a few years ago, although we’ve nev­er prop­erly met), so I was kind of unpre­pared for the spare and genu­inely poet­ic feel of Greetings From Tim Buckley. And its ballsy but not osten­ta­tious buck­ing of stand­ard biop­ic tropes. I was really taken with it; I think it’s one of the out­stand­ing movies of the year so far.

Now, does it depict how stuff really “went down?” I could­n’t tell you entirely, and even if I could, the answer would still likely be “Yes and no.”  I was talk­ing to Gary about it and I asked him, “You wer­en’t rock­ing the hat back then, were you?” Like myself a con­nois­seur of hair loss, Gary in recent years has made a borsalino part of his present­a­tion, but no, dur­ing his col­lab­or­a­tion with Jeff he was going au naturel. Also, Gary in real life was a lot more imme­di­ately impressed with Jeff. As for myself, I thought Jeff was a great singer—how could you not—but in my admitedly rather lim­ited inter­ac­tions with him, I also found him a bit of a jerk, for lack of a bet­ter word. Once he embraced the fact that he was gonna be the most cha­ris­mat­ic guy in the room 999 time out of a thou­sand, he embraced it with a ven­geance, let’s say. In any event it does­n’t mat­ter; Algrant has taken the real life bits, includ­ing a lot of won­der­ful music, and cre­ated a story of his own that’s smart, enga­ging, and unex­pec­tedly res­on­ant. You should see it.