And while Irish singer/songwriter Glen Hansard has a right to say that Cale is a master of stripping songs down to their essential parts, Cohen’s music was never exactly ornate, with the notable exception of the corrosive and free-wheeling Phil Spector-produced album Death of a Ladies’ Man. Sloman takes credit for suggesting Cale for I’m Your Fan, which is fair, but only so interesting. And there’s no shortage of concert movies and tribute albums, including the 1974 documentary “ Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire” and the 1991 cover album I’m Your Fan, the latter of which is credited with helping to revive “Hallelujah” thanks to John Cale’s cover. There are plenty of good and even recent enough profiles and interviews with Cohen, like David Remnick’s impressive 2016 New Yorker profile. To their credit, Geller and Goldfine encourage viewers to come to their own conclusions, partly as a means of embracing Cohen’s sometimes ambivalent attitude towards explaining his life and music. But the concert footage doesn’t play long enough to show us what Cohen looked or sounded like when he performed that song, and Sloman’s talking head interviews mostly speak to the movie’s glib understanding of Cohen’s art. And audio excerpts from Cohen’s interviews with former Rolling Stone reporter Larry “Ratso” Sloman also give viewers some clues as to why Geller and Goldfine only dig so deep into the meaning of “Hallelujah” and its surprising combination of religious and sexual images. It’s great to see so much old concert footage from various periods of Cohen’s career. “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” glosses over some of the best evidence to support what is, at heart, a basic story: after laboring for years on the lyrics for “Hallelujah,” and then later struggling with his own personal and creative demons, Cohen’s song helped to spark a late-career revival and mini-creative renaissance, too. Cohen’s “Halleluljah” is then presented as a trite symbol of his frustrated creative ambitions, though archival interviews with Cohen do effectively suggest that there’s more to his music-and that song, in particular-than the usual artistic triumph over industrial exploitation narrative. This was decades after the song debuted in 1984 on Various Positions, a (rather good) studio album that was rejected by Columbia Records and barely released in the United States. Geller and Goldfine’s docu-collage of interview and concert footage doesn’t give deep consideration to the conditions that led to “Hallelujah” becoming a late career hit for Cohen.
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