Hallelujah Leonard Cohen A Journey, A Song (2022)
Directed by Dayna Goldfine, Dan Geller
Produced by Sony Pictures Classics
Starring Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, Brandi Carlisle, Eric Church
Release Date July 1st, 2022
My first exposure to the work of Leonard Cohen came from the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume. That film starred Christian Slater as a teenage pirate radio host. Slater’s character used Cohen’s song, Everybody Knows, as an emblem of the character's own cynical worldview. It was a potent and memorable inclusion. Cohen’s voice and his reputation provided a gravitas to the movie with Cohen having a reputation as a thinking man’s pop star.
I heard, and became infatuated with, Everybody Knows even before I had heard and loved the song that became Cohen’s most beloved and memorable work, Hallelujah. For me, it was not until Jeff Buckley had died tragically and his version of Hallelujah had become the most well known and talked about version of the song that I had heard the song. Eventually, I heard Cohen’s version and found it inferior to both Buckley and John Cale’s more mainstream takes on the song.
Find my full length review at Beat.Media, linked here.
