"Greetings from Tim Buckley" sidesteps the conventions of the musical biopic. It's a no-pressure, just-hanging-out movie. You can easily forget that what you're seeing is scripted or acted at all; the feeling is as of a friendly fly-on-the-wall documentary.
The subject is Jeff Buckley, son of Tim Buckley, the prodigiously gifted hippie-era troubadour who died young. Jeff scarcely knew his father. The film covers a span of a week when Jeff (Penn Badgley) takes up an open-ended invitation to a memorial concert given by some of Tim's friends and associates. At this point in his life Jeff is noodling around with music himself, not quite seriously - and he agrees to perform one of Tim's songs at the concert.
While Jeff mixes with the musicians, explores New York, - and caries on a week-long lunch-date flirtation with one of the show's producers (played by Imogen Poots) - he also digs into his past, or it digs into him. He's trying to read the pre-history of his own consciousness, and there are no records of that. Here glows the young Tim Buckley (Ben Rosenfield), in flashbacks or in old raw footage. Just a few flashes of edge and dazzle to suggest why he became a legend. Even when he's all beat out, his nimbus doesn't desert him - they slump beat together (and a beat nimbus is something to see); with the best will in the world, too weary to be as congenial as his record label would like. Is it the nimbus of an angel or a pop star? Whichever it really is, it's pressed into service as the other one too. Tim Buckley was only 28 when he died. So much still in the realm of possibility, unanswerable. The melancholy undertone of the film is how for Jeff, his father's absence is a presence. You may come to feel that this is a movie about a haunting, a daylight ghost story. It has to be elusive; what stays with you is the music.
Review of Greetings from Tim Buckley
