Magnolia Pictures dropped the trailer for upcoming Jeff Buckley documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley on Wednesday, a first look that frequently hints at Buckley’s mortality and leans into the enigmatic nature of the famed singer.
“How would you like your fans to think of you,” an interviewer asks as the trailer opens. “Just the music,” he responds. “Because when I’m dead, that’s the only thing that’ll be around.”
Elsewhere in trailer, Buckley’s remembered for opining that “I’m not going to last that long,” while a question from an interview on “where would you like to see yourself in 10 years” goes unanswered, with a moment of suspense.
Director Amy Berg delivers It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley with archival footage combined with interviews his mother Mary Guibert and former partners Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser, and with his bandmates as well as with contemporaries like Aimee Mann, who can be seen in the trailer calling Buckley “literally the best singer I’ve ever heard.” The film, which debuted at Sundance back in January, is slated to hit theaters on Aug. 8.
“It’s difficult to imagine a time when I wasn’t attempting to make the Jeff Buckley doc,” Berg said in a statement. “It’s been on my bucket list since I made my first film in 2006. And maybe, since I first heard Grace in 1994. It changed my life forever. It literally became the “tear that hangs inside my soul forever.”
In a review, The Hollywood Reporter film critic David Rooney called the picture a “stirring if circumscribed tribute” to Buckley, writing that “it might not be the Buckley bio everyone needs, but it’s a stirring tribute made with a lot of heart.”
Watch the full trailer below.