A new documentary about late singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Director Amy Berg’s It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley was years in the making, and includes never-before-seen footage from Buckley’s archives, as well as interviews with the artist’s mother, Mary Guibert, former partners Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser, hiss former bandmates, and musicians like Ben Harper and Aimee Mann. Today, Magnolia Pictures has released the first official trailer for the film. Check it out below, and scroll down for the movie poster.
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley arrives in theaters on Friday, August 8. It will premiere on HBO and stream on HBO Max in the winter.
In a director’s statement, Berg revealed that she has been trying to make a documentary on Buckley for nearly 20 years. “I first approached Mary, Jeff’s mom, in 2007,” she said. “It seemed like she wanted to work together, but she opted out.”
The filmmaker continued: “She wanted to make a scripted film and offered it to me to direct, but after exploring the incredible archive, I knew this was a doc. I couldn’t get Jeff’s final voicemail to his mother out of my mind for years. It made me cry on many occasions as it probably will for you. I reached out to [Mary] every time I finished a film, and she ‘politely’ declined. Until the summer of 2019. My timing was finally right! I can honestly say the euphoria still hasn’t settled.”
The film touches on Buckley’s childhood, his prominence in New York’s avant-garde downtown scene in the early 1990s, and his rise to fame with the release of his masterful 1994 debut—and only studio album—Grace. Berg’s documentary pays special attention to the women who were pivotal in Buckley’s life, including his mother, who raised him alone. (Buckley met his father, the famed folk singer Tim Buckley, only once, when he was eight years old.)
Jeff Buckley died in 1997 at the age of 30. During that time period, he had been working on his sophomore LP, My Sweetheart the Drunk, with producer and Television frontman Tom Verlaine. The collected recordings of those sessions, titled Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk were released in 1998.
