Synopsis/Details
EXTENDED SYNOPSIS (From Pro Coverage)
Act One
The film opens in 1996, inside a therapist's office with enormous windows and rain sheeting down the glass. Jeff Buckley — 29, in a fur coat, with something hollow behind his eyes — sits atop a couch. He touches a Pepsi bottle cap on a chain around his neck. In a whisper, he says he only saw his father twice.
JEFF BUCKLEY opens in fractured time, the way memory actually works. The first flashback is radiant and brutal in equal measure: the Troubadour Club, 1975, Young Jeff watching Tim Buckley perform from the wings, his mother Mary holding him close. Tim looks down from the stage and smiles at his son with the warmth of the sun. Then: FREEZE FRAME. Months later, Tim was dead.
Back in Mrs. Wilkins' office, Jeff holds a worn cardboard box marked "TIM." He says it's everything he has of him. Then: a time dissolve to 1991, Los Angeles, Jeff in a Banana Republic nametag sitting with Chris Dowd — his best friend, his grounding force — learning that a Tim Buckley tribute concert in New York wants him to come. The news hits Jeff like weather.
At St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn, a gorgeous Gothic revival space with 60-foot ceilings, Jeff is visibly overwhelmed. He downplays himself to program director Janine Nichols — "I don't sing much, I just play guitar" — and meets Rebecca Moore, dark-haired, pale-skinned, effortlessly warm. Their connection is immediate and entirely natural. Jeff calls himself the lone imposter; Rebecca taps his lanyard and says he's Jeff Buckley. That's the beginning of everything.
The tribute concert itself is the script's first great set piece. Jeff performs his father's songs, then subverts one of them — "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain" — by singing his own improvised lyrics. Danny Fields and Columbia A&R rep Steve Berkowitz are in the audience. Berkowitz leans in: "You hearing what I'm hearing?" When a guitar string snaps and forces Jeff to sing unaccompanied, the power is palpable. Backstage, Jeff breaks down crying. Rebecca puts her arm around him.
From there, JEFF BUCKLEY moves into the momentum of early promise. Jeff and Rebecca move in together in the East Village. He signs with Columbia Records, pockets a $100,000 advance — which he and Rebecca ceremonially split via a novelty chocolate bar — and assembles a band with Mick Grondahl and Matt Johnson. The industry is circling. Danny Fields delivers a Linda McCartney photograph of Tim. George Stein becomes Jeff's lawyer and manager. Berkowitz and Jeff develop a close, combustible alliance built on genuine mutual respect.
But fractures are already there. Jeff's mercurial temper flashes at Matt in rehearsal. He smashes Rebecca's birthday flowers during an argument about his black journal — his private creative space that no one is allowed to touch. When Rebecca hands him Mrs. Wilkins' card, he snaps. He's already starting to choose the music over everything else.
Act Two
The recording of Grace at Bearsville Studios is where JEFF BUCKLEY locks in its portrait of creative obsession at war with human cost. Jeff dyes his hair jet black — "Fuck yeah. Change." — and works with producer Andy Wallace while the band takes shape. Berkowitz fights with Columbia president Don Ienner over Jeff's insistence on a band, his rejection of producers, and his decision to pull "Forget Her" off the album. It has smash potential, Ienner says. Jeff doesn't care. He doesn't want to hurt her more than he already has.
Rebecca reads the situation accurately. As Jeff and his new musical life expand, there's no room for her. When Joan Wasser enters — a classically trained musician with The Dambuilders, younger than Jeff but years ahead of him professionally — the dynamic shifts. Jeff tells Chris Dowd he needs easier. He loves them both, but Joan understands. The scene where Rebecca spells out "D-O-A" for their old life at the recording console is a gut punch that doesn't announce itself.
The U.S. club tour is rendered in vivid shorthand: fast food in the van, Jeff always at the window, small crowds in record stores while the band hovers invisibly. The EP sells in Japan and France. But the overseas tour is where the cracks become fissures. At the Olympia Theater in Paris, Jeff performs with explosive physical presence. In the VIP room afterward, in a fur coat at 90 degrees, he's drinking shots four at a time. Chris Dowd pulls the fifth away. A drummer friend has told Chris about black tar heroin. Tim's death — a heroin accident at 28 — is the ghost in the room. Chris says it plainly. Jeff dismisses it.
The Denver concert is the volcanic center of Act Two. Jeff, borderline drunk, gets heckled to play his father's songs, then agrees to "Song to the Siren" — but wraps it in a monologue about being "somebody's son" and "somebody's stinkin' T-shirt" that is both hilarious and unbearably raw. Drummer Matt Johnson drops his drumsticks into Jeff's pocket and exits without drama. When Jeff gets named one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People" and photographs like a teen idol pin-up, he tries to cancel the rest of the tour.
The Sag Harbor retreat to write the second album is an extended failure. Joan stops a demo cold with one word — "Same" — and walks out. Berkowitz shows up and hears fragments. A 50-grand studio session with Verlaine yields nothing usable. Jeff's mood swings from manic productivity to crushing self-loathing. He asks Mrs. Wilkins if he might need medication. He describes a dream in which Tim serenades his wedding to Rebecca, holds him, and tells him he never left him — he left his mother. The tears come. They don't feel staged. They feel like relief.
The hallucination sequence — Jeff in his apartment bathroom, deep in something he shouldn't be, the floor rolling like ocean waves, Tim appearing underwater in jeans and moccasin boots — is JEFF BUCKLEY's most formally daring passage. The two of them, suspended underwater, talk about the tribute show, about forgiveness, about the broken guitar string. Tim turns Jeff's bottle cap outward — "I broke the string" — and tells him he was proud. When Tim fades, Jeff screams for him not to go.
Act Three
Memphis is the film's emotional exhale, and also its final movement. 1997. Jeff has stopped dyeing his hair black. His natural brown is growing back in. He rides a mountain bike, eats Vietnamese food, photographs butterflies at the zoo. He performs low-key sets at Barristers Bar until a fan's website blows his cover and 500 people show up. He erupts at the fan — Gayle — in a moment that's ugly and panicked and human, and then sprints after her the moment he realizes what he's done.
The Memphis house scenes with Joan are the warmest passages in the script. Jeff in a skirt and eye makeup, the two of them singing ELO's "Telephone Line" face-to-face — it's funny and tender and genuinely alive. He tells Joan he's 30. He outlived his father. He never thought he'd make it this far.
The late-night phone calls Jeff makes from the Memphis house are the script's most quietly devastating sequence. He calls Chris Dowd at 3:30 AM just to say he loves him. He calls Rebecca at nearly 4 AM and tells her he's been thinking about her and wants her to know he loves her very much. In slow motion, he circles a doodled butterfly beside her name in his journal. Her name has already been crossed off.
JEFF BUCKLEY builds to its ending with a kind of inevitable terrible grace. Gene and Foti arrive. The band is coming in. Sessions are scheduled with Andy Wallace. But Jeff can't reach Mrs. Wilkins — her voicemail is full — and Joan calls from a noisy club to say she's just found out: Mrs. Wilkins had a heart attack on vacation in the Caribbean. She's recovering. Jeff gets none of this message.
At night, Foti drives Jeff in a borrowed open-top Cadillac El Dorado through Memphis. They end up at the Wolf River. Jeff strips off his boots and wades in. Foti pleads. A tug boat passes. Jeff swims back toward shore — "There! Happy now?!" — and then swims right back out. A 100-foot barge comes. Jeff stays clear of it, then swims out again. Foti climbs down to save the boom box from rising water. He takes his eyes off Jeff for a few seconds, tops.
When Foti looks up, Jeff is gone.
Underwater, the final images flash in slow motion — boots, lips, the Altamont T-shirt, green nail polish, the Pepsi bottle cap — and then Jeff floats into frame, eyes closed, a hint of a smile on his face, the current leading him toward a faint white light. Hallelujah begins to play. Beale Street superimposes on the screen. Bono's quote appears. The final legend tells us Jeff's body was found six days later at the foot of Beale Street. June 4th, 1997.
