‘Hallelujah’ is one of the only films about Leonard Cohen worthy of its subject

Can the life of a songwriter be told in a single song? It certainly can if the tune has the convoluted trajectory of “Hallelujah� and the individual in question is Leonard Cohen, poet and preeminent troubadour of gloom. Should that seem like thin substance for a feature-length documentary, the result — “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song� — is endlessly fascinating. The tale of its making, by extraordinary San Francisco filmmakers Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, is equally compelling.

“It was the summer after we finished ‘Galapagos (Affair),’� Goldfine recently reminisced. “(Film writer) David Thomson said, ‘Have you ever considered doing a documentary about a song?’ It didn’t really strike a chord for either of us at the time. Then I remembered seeing Leonard Cohen in Oakland and one of the most memorable pieces of that show was his performance of ‘Hallelujah.’�

Considering that the song would begin its recorded existence on “Various Positions,� a 1984 album Cohen’s record label deemed insufficiently commercial to release in the United States, its initial exposure was relegated to an early admirer: Bob Dylan, who performed the track at a handful of concerts during his late '80s tour. In terms of critical appreciation, “Hallelujah� was for many years destined not to be a major or even well-known Cohen song.

Much of the song’s rambling path to popularity is documented in Alan Light’s  “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah,� published a decade ago (with a forthcoming second edition). An inspiration for the film, the book opens with the assorted verses of the song written by Cohen, with its samplings from the Psalms, the Kabbalah and Hasidic thought. Cohen’s first recording included just four verses. 

John Cale, formerly of ex-Velvet Underground, covered “Hallelujah� a half decade later for a Hal Willner-produced Cohen tribute, “I’m Your Fan,� keeping the first two verses, dropping the next two and then adding three more (from a sampling of 15 that Cohen faxed to him). It was said that Cohen wrote 180 verses — or, in another telling, 150 — over the course of seven years. Whatever the number, each subsequent version of “Hallelujah� consists of some permutation of these seven. A singer can choose to either dial up or down the religiosity or the sensuality accordingly. 

The song’s influence has now appeared in places Cohen probably never imagined. It served as montage music for the 2001 animated film “Shrek� and was played during the 2020 Republican National Convention, Donald Trump using “Hallelujah� twice without permission on the ceremony’s final night. 

Once Goldfine and Geller determined there was a worthy film in this tower of song, they immediately recognized the challenges. “One was that there would be no way that Leonard would agree to sit for an interview,� Geller confides. Fortunately, Cohen was filmed repeatedly throughout his life. A late-bloomer tunesmith, he was a well-established poet and novelist before turning his sights on songwriting in his 30s. The fabulous “Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen,� produced by the National Film Board of Canada, dates from his pre-musician era. 

The undeterred filmmakers approached Robert Kory, Cohen’s then-manager (and trustee of the Cohen Family Trust), to get Cohen’s blessing on the project. “There were other people who had ideas about a ‘Hallelujah’ film,� said Geller. “They said yes to us because I think Leonard was intrigued by our work and what we were proposing to do with the song and his life.� 

Once they had Cohen’s approval, the filmmakers went to Sony for the music licensing, another considerable complication. Music rights for an independently produced film can calculate to a figure higher than the entire budget of the production. Though the permission from Cohen came quickly, securing the music took another 18 months. Then shooting began in August of 2016, only a handful of weeks before Cohen’s death. 

The first three of 13 chapters in “The Holy or the Broken� detail the writing, recording and heartache of John Lissauer, the album’s producer, who saw the “Hallelujah� record passed over by the studio. The remaining 200 or so pages are a litany of other covers, largely derived from the Cale version of the song rather than the Cohen one. Foremost among them was a version little heard at the time of its release by the son of Tim Buckley. Jeff Buckley’s version brings the sensuality of youth to its pinnacle. Arguably, all subsequent renditions are benchmarked to that rendition.

Even Cohen, in his later tours, performs a composite of the “Various Positions� album edition combined with a few of the additional verses, popularized by its appearance in “Shrek� and performances in far too many televised singing competitions. The film appropriately opens with the final performance of the titular tune at the last date of the Old Ideas tour in Auckland, New Zealand, at the close of 2013.

Like Light’s book, Goldfine's and Geller’s “Hallelujah� has a similar parade of performers who have each been moved by the song and were tempted to put their own proverbial spin on it. The book goes wider but not deeper; the film fortunately spares audiences the Jon Bon Jovi, Michael Bolton and Susan Boyle abominations, subjecting viewers to a montage of the amateur versions while focusing largely on the better renditions: k.d. lang, Brandi Carlile, Rufus Wainwright and others (with a justifiable queering by these aforementioned three along the way).

Beyond the song, the film significantly draws from numerous unpublished conversations with Larry “Ratso� Sloman (who does not appear in the Light book) paired with recent interviews with Cohen collaborators Judy Collins, Sharon Robinson, Dominique Issermann and others. Geller and Goldfine turn these materials into a veritable gold mine.

Following the one-two punch of premiering “Hallelujah� at the Venice and Telluride film festivals in September, Goldfine and Geller negotiated an ideal partnership with Tom Bernard and Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics. It is a match of exceptional proportions given the synchronicity of music publishing rights for both Cohen and Buckley under the same corporate umbrella, resulting  in a recently released Cohen companion compilation, “Hallelujah and Songs from His Albums.�

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of “Hallelujah� is that it is one of the only films about Cohen that is worthy of its subject. It is an improbable journey of a song by the most reluctant of celebrities. Like all of their earlier work, Geller and Goldfine exquisitely peel back layer upon layer to arrive at a wellspring. They avoid all of the usual music documentary trappings, and with their latest film focus on the richness of an inspiration.