Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2006) is a tribute film featuring songs by Leonard Cohen performed by an array of singers who are known in folk and alternative adult music circles but not in the pop music world. The most prominent performers featured are Linda Thompson (former wife of Richard Thompson), Nick Cave, and Rufus Wainwright. Their performances are interspersed with interviews with Cohen, commentaries by others (especially Bono), film clips, and photographs from Cohen’s career.

For the most part, the performances are strong and highlight Cohen’s brilliance as a lyricist in particular but also as an accomplished melodist. Some of the most effective performances are “The Traitor,” by Martha Wainwright; “If I Be Your Will” by the brilliant and strange Anthony of Anthony and the Johnsons; “Sisters of Mercy,” by Beth Orton; and “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” about Cohen’s relationship with Janice Joplin, sung by Rufus Wainwright. I have admired this song for 35 years without knowing that it is about Joplin. Rufus Wainwright is especially good as an interpreter of Cohen’s songs. The musicians and singers are well rehearsed. The music is beautiful. My one complaint is that several of the singers kept looking down at a podium to read the words they are singing. This was a distraction. The weakest performances were by Nick Cave, who seemed mannered and distracted. The McGarrigle Sisters and Teddy Thompson were impressive. The film ends with Cohen himself performing “Tower of Song” with U2.

Cohen is a strange man who has lived long periods of his life in a Buddhist monastery and who portrays himself as a reticent and content iconoclast. The documentary portions of this film recall some of the 1965 film Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen, filmed in Montreal while Cohen was an aspiring poet and before his career as a singer began. In that film, as this one, there is much insistence on his genius, his unique character, and his art. Both films use some of the same images and film clips to illustrate his life. I am not sure that Cohen is or ever has been a great poet. His poems are certainly interesting. I did believe that his songs are so unusual and specific to his voice that only he can perform them properly. This film proves me wrong on that point. But I’m Your Man in general seems to overreach in its claims for Cohen as a universal genius. One commentator (was he a member of U2?) characterizes Cohen as a man who has come down from the mountain with golden tablets of wisdom. This seems a bit much.

As much as I admire Cohen as a lyricist, singer, and songwriter, I suspect he is a distant and unapproachable man. He always seems—both in the music and in the two films from different parts of his life—self-consumed and preoccupied, not as an egomaniac, but rather as a man whose thoughts always turn inward, in the form of contemplation, self-scrutiny. This would make sense given his devotion to Buddhism and (I assume) meditation of some form. He is able in the calmest and most articulate ways to express his own ideas, but how difficult would it be to break through that wall of self-absorption to get him to listen to others? This would be a challenge.

The inwardness of Leonard Cohen comes out in the intelligent beauty of his lyrics, his quiet manner of singing, his romanticism.

Despite the hagiographic exaggeration (for which Cohen should be embarrassed), this is a fine film of its type.