Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
Directed by Lian Lunson
Starring Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and Bono
Classification: G
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Rating: **½
Anyone with a deep appreciation of Leonard Cohen's lyrics, which should include anyone with a pulse, will find much to like about I'm Your Man. But not nearly enough to love. This is the hybrid car of documentaries, driven by two very different energy sources. It cruises to the beat of a concert film, where singing devotees have gathered to cover the celebrated Cohen standards, and then it idles to the chatter of talking-heads, among them the closely cropped noggin of the great man himself. The musical cruising has its ups and downs, while the idle chatter is consistently reverential, at least when Cohen isn't talking. Which brings us to the problem: Cohen frequently isn't talking — the subject too often goes missing from his own portrait.
The concert, held Down Under in Sydney, features an impressive assembly of sensitive souls all eager to put on their scuba gear and plunge into those lyrics' meaningful depths. They include Nick Cave, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, both Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Antony Hegarty, Beth Orton and, in a separate sequence shot in New York, none other than U2. Cave sets the tempo, singing first the title song and then its writer's praises, after which Cohen is heard in his California home, sounding a slightly less auspicious note: “I'm not a very nostalgic person, who looks at the past to summon up regret or self-congratulation.”
That's infinitely wise, like much of Cohen's commentary, but it doesn't augur well for a revealing interview. Nevertheless, director Lian Lunson has found her structure and she's sticking to it: Song, chat, song, chat. On the discourse side of the ledger, Bono makes repeated appearances, clearly intent on cranking up the praise to panegyric heights. His effusions start at base camp (“This is our Shelley, our Byron”) before pushing on to the summit (“The rest of us would be very humbled by the stuff he throws away”). I think we can conclude that Bono is a fan.
Back on the concert stage, the tributes enjoy the singular advantage of being in the poet's own language. Obviously, personal taste will determine your favourite renditions. I'm drawn to the purist approach — the McGarrigle sisters doing Winter Lady, Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla in Anthem — that highlight the lyrics by not competing with them. Others — Rufus's take on Everybody Knows, Antony's on If It Be Your Will — seem a bit mannered to me, a case of the singer too obsessed with imprinting his own stamp on the song. Lunson's camera has a similar tendency, occasionally flying off for the acute angle or the artsy close-up. And her insistence on inserting surreal flash-forwards to the climactic New York gig — where Cohen himself combines with U2 on Tower of Song — does less to whet our appetite than to dampen it.
As for the Cohen-in-conversation segments, he chats a little about his earliest influences (the liturgy in the synagogue), explains the genesis of a few songs (like Janis Joplin's lusty contribution to Chelsea Hotel No. 2), and observes that life “got a whole lot easier when I no longer expected to win.” The latter remark, casually tossed-off, is a lovely distillation in prose of the sensual tension, that unique blend of joy and lamentation, that infuses so much of his poetry.
By contrast, the documentary seeks only to make a joyful noise, and is sometimes laboured in the love it so keenly wants to express. Then again, as Leonard would be the first to concede, there are worse sins than flawed worship.
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