Leonard Cohen’s 70th is celebrated by peers and performers in this concert documentary framed around 2005’s tribute at the Sydney Opera House. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews I’m Your Man.


BASED AROUND the 2005 70th birthday tribute concerts, I’m Your Man is essentially a live concert show with some talking-head interview slots fleshing it out just enough to justify it as a documentary. Nonetheless it’s a great glimpse in to the world of Leonard Cohen. As a confessional writer, Cohen has always allowed plenty of his psyche in to his work, but only measured amounts of his actual life, so anyone disappointed at the fact that this music doco doesn’t quite dish the dirt is missing the point. Ever since Cohen admitted that one of his most famous songs was about Janis Joplin he’s tended to keep rather quiet.

The point of this film is to celebrate the man’s work, something Cohen seems incapable of doing himself, hardly touring, recording only sporadically and never, as he basically says himself, looking back.

So here we have Jarvis Cocker (Pulp) and Nick Cave doing his songs. We have the stunning Rufus Wainwright and his equally passionate, emotive sister, Martha. Their mother and aunty, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, provide a link back to the Canadian folk circuit that first got Cohen started at this craft. And there are plenty of modern admirers (Beth Orton, The Handsome Family) flitting in and around the old seasoned hands (Linda Thompson).

The film begins with Cave embodying the title track, as Nick Cave tends to do when he performs a song; he crawls inside it and lets it shake loose around his rubbery limbs. Artists get to share their sentiments in recorded interviews (Cave talks about the joy of discovering Leonard Cohen’s Songs Of Love And Hate in a tiny wee town out of Melbourne) or simply pay tribute by offering back the gift of song, placing their versions at the feet of the master who wrote them. Antony Hegarty (Antony & The Johnsons) chills spines with his rendition of ‘If It Be Your Will’, his androgynous tones echoing the late, great Nina Simone; his quivering vibrato coming from the soul.

It’s a deceptively simple movie, sure, it’s just a concert film, but as with Jonathan Demme’s Heart Of Gold film from last year, which captured Neil Young performing a range of his own material with a star-studded band, there is so much extra meaning to be gleamed just from listening to the material in the live context. And Cohen’s songs have always been open to interpretation – literally taking on new life as different singers approach them in their own tone. Cohen’s the man when it comes to lyric writing, but he doesn’t do much with the melodic line – leaving it open for talented performers to play.

My only issue with this film is that when he does eventually sing for the camera, in a very moving version of ‘Tower Of Song’ it’s backed by Bono and U2. It just seems like one of the world’s biggest bands is there to tick another legend off their list, collaborating with Cohen being their statement to match recording with Johnny Cash before he dies or Bono composing a poem for Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. The Edge plays the same slide lines that he has played for the past decade – basically it sounds like U2 ballad formula # 1. Yes, I know this sounds like a giant gripe at U2 just for the sake of it – but I would have loved to hear Cohen backed by the same band of close-to-anonymous musicians that made the McGarrigles, the Wainwrights, Beth Orton, Nick Cave and Teddy Thompson sound so good. Oh well, like any good music documentary, it has sent me back to the music (its original source) – and to Cohen’s words from his great anthology, Stranger Music and the recent Book Of Longing. So I shouldn’t really complain.

I’m Your Man won’t mean too much unless you’ve already made Leonard’s acquaintance through his remarkable body of work.