If anyone was destined to become a songwriter’s songwriter, that person was Leonard Cohen. He wrote hymn-like songs about sex and death, sung in a baritone that fans would describe as profound and detractors would dismiss as monotonous; his peers and the artists who cited him as an influence brought his words to a wider audience through their covers of his work. Through Jeff Buckley’s spare, ethereal cover of “Hallelujah”, interest in Cohen’s music reached a peak in the 2000s. Buckley and producer Andy Wallace’s arrangement of the song became a popular needle drop in films and TV shows, and artists like John Cale and Rufus Wainwright—as well as a few American Idol contestants—brought this new version of “Hallelujah” to a wider audience.
In the documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, filmmakers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller explore the history of Cohen’s signature song. Audiences who come to the film with a love of the song “Hallelujah” but no real knowledge of Cohen’s life or career might be interested in learning more about the influence of his music on singer/songwriters in the 1960s and beyond. Because Cohen’s musical and literary career dovetailed with a series of innovations in documentary filmmaking, his body of work and his evolution as a musician and writer has been well represented in nonfiction film.
Cohen is closely associated with the city of Montreal, where he was born and came of age. It seems right that his first documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen, was a product of the National Film Board of Canada’s Direct Cinema movement. Directors Donald Britten and Don Owen followed Cohen on a series of readings and appearances in Montreal to support Beautiful Losers, his first novel.
To contemporary audiences, Ladies and Gentlemen looks like a self-aware version of the promotional packages you see on TV shows like CBS Sunday Morning. Britten and Owen build the making of the film into the film itself by showing cameras and sound equipment in a few shots and editing the NFB’s countdown leader into a final sequence where Cohen views a rough cut of the documentary. The writer also addresses members of the film crew and makes jokes and observations about things they’ve shot or events they’ve seen, sometimes before these events are presented in the film.
Ladies and Gentlemen contradicts some of the received knowledge later audiences would have about Cohen. The intensity of his poetry and song lyrics, combined with his retreat into a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mid-1990s, gave him the aura of a dour prophet disenchanted with the modern world. The opening scene of Ladies and Gentlemen—in which Cohen performs an extemporaneous-seeming standup act about his ill-fated visit to a friend in a mental institution—shows that he could have evolved from a poet and novelist to a quick-witted comedian instead of a singer/songwriter. While he cultivated an image as a dapper rogue in his final years, his rugged good looks and edgy preppy wardrobe evoke the dashing young men who graced every sad girl’s Tumblr dashboard in the 2010s.
Many music fans who can appreciate Cohen’s songs have cited his deep, vibrato-heavy bass-baritone as a deterrent. I’m Your Man, Lian Lunson’s 2006 documentary about the Australian tribute concert Came So Far for Beauty, gives those listeners what they want, with a Pitchfork-approved cast of mid-2000s indie singers performing Cohen’s most beloved songs alongside a cast of his contemporaries and their offspring. Musically, the event sounds like a single-artist tribute album that a respectable indie label would release in the 1990s, a comparison that makes sense when music director Hal Willner—who produced many of those compilations—appears on-camera as an interview subject.
On a visual level, the three-camera setup and nondescript stage set suggests the kind of concert you’d see on PBS during pledge week. A few of the more dramatic performers attempt visually compelling performances, as with the high-stepping version of “I’m Your Man” by Nick Cave that opens the film, but many of the younger performers have a fidgety, deer-in-the-headlights quality that gets distracting.
Lunson interspersed the concert footage with interviews with the participants and with Cohen himself. The interview was shot a year before the embezzlement that forced Cohen back on tour and finds the singer in a relaxed, jovial mood, telling amusing stories from his career and cracking a sly smile from under the wide brim of his trademark fedora. While some of the other interview subjects follow Cohen’s bemused, self-aware lead—as with Rufus Wainwright’s tale of meeting his friend Lorca Cohen’s dad for the first time—others attempt to evoke the poet’s somber literary and musical persona with varying degrees of success. (Those with a low tolerance for the lubricious oratory style of Bono from U2 should have their finger on the fast-forward button.)
The role of the muse played a huge role in Cohen’s creative output; two of his best-known songs were about women who played a significant role in his life, and his use of female vocalists and songwriting collaborators was a key component of his work. The documentary Marianne & Leonard looks at his career through the prism of his relationship with Marianne Ihlen, a woman he met on the Greek island of Hydra who inspired some of his most well-known songs.
After opening with Ihlen and Cohen’s deaths, which happened a few months apart from one another, director Nick Broomfield opens the story in the mid-1960s, when Cohen was a celebrated poet but had yet to pick up a guitar. Ihlen, a divorcee with a young son, welcomed the writer into her home and encouraged him to write and eventually to make music. Ihlen’s need for a relatively stable life conflicted with Cohen’s more freewheeling lifestyle (and his love of women), but they remained in contact throughout their lives.
Marianne and Leonard has a less sensationalistic approach to its subject matter than many of Broomfield’s previous documentaries. He interviews sources whose names would be unfamiliar to all but the most devoted Cohen fan, and editor Marc Hoeferlin stays with some of the interviews instead of rapidly cutting away to stills or archival footage that would illustrate the point they were making. His use of home movie footage shot when Cohen was living in Hydra gives the film a pleasantly intimate feel, which is supported by Broomfield’s voiceover recollections of the time he spent with Ihlen when he was a young man.
The film is engaging and at times poignant—as in the scenes in the film that depict Ihlen’s son’s fate—but watching it in the post-MeToo era can feel a little uncomfortable. The split between Cohen’s globe-trotting, womanizing lifestyle and Ihlen’s modest, domestic existence falls a little too neatly along gendered lines. While singer/songwriter Julie Felix speaks to Ihlen’s encouragement of her musical career, her statements that Cohen “loved women” and hoped for a matriarchal leadership during his lifetime seems a bit doth-protest-too-much, especially in the context of Cohen’s anti-choice lyrics for “The Future”.
Leonard Cohen left an influential literary and musical legacy, which can be intimidating for newcomers who are interested in his work. These documentaries put Cohen’s work in context and allow listeners to hear his music and poetry in conversation with their eras. Perhaps Goldfine and Geller’s Hallelujah will allow even the most seasoned Cohen devotee to hear his most beloved song in a new light. 
“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” is in theaters now.