The biggest shortcoming of “Greetings from Tim Buckley,” directed and written by Daniel Algrant with co-writers Emma Sheanshang and David Brendel, is that there honestly isn’t much story here. Jeff Buckley was abandoned by his father, resented him for much of his life, but eventually decided to sing at a tribute concert honoring him—called Greetings from Tim Buckley—in 1991. The concert did a couple of important things, really: it introduced the world to Jeff as a singer and it allowed him to reach some kind of closure about his lack of a relationship with his father. Six years later, after much critical acclaim, Jeff Buckley would die, an accidental drowning, in the Mississippi River. A family line cut off. A chapter in music closed. A sense of finality, then, to the contentious relationship that defined both Tim and Jeff Buckley. An unchangeable ending.
I’ve made that all sound very sinister and melancholy, I suppose, but “Greetings from Tim Buckley” isn’t nearly that morbid or macabre. Instead, it’s given a sense of vibrancy and life from Penn Badgley (of “Easy A”), who plays Jeff Buckley; the star of the teen soap “Gossip Girl” does amazingly heavy lifting here, imbuing each scene with a kind of emotional subtlety and nuance. The script requires him to go over the top sometimes—there are lots of angry shrugs and outbursts, especially when the constant refrain he gets from his father’s admiring fans is, “You look just like him”—but mostly Badgley is excellent. He’s funny, he’s loving, he’s curious, he’s talented. Watching Badgley as Buckley, and knowing what the needless death that would eventually befall the singer-songwriter, will break your heart.
But the film mostly sidesteps the “what will happen to Jeff” side of the story to focus on “how Jeff got where he is,” using a dual narrative of his life and his father’s (Tim is played by Ben Rosenfield) to demonstrate how the two impacted each other. Tim is a singer-songwriter putting out an impressive display of material, dozens of songs and quite a few records, during his marriage to Jeff’s mother—until he decides to leave one night, fleeing with another girl, abandoning his wife and Jeff. Tim’s life is a cycle of girls, a cycle of songs, a cycle of half-decisions fueled by regret.
Years later someone tells Jeff that Tim used to sneak back into the house and watch Jeff sleep, the kind of revelation that fills his son with rage and resentment. Jeff doesn’t want to end up like Tim, doesn’t want to coast on his father’s name, but when the organizers from Greetings from Tim Buckley, being held in a church in Brooklyn, come calling, what is he supposed to do—say no? And so Jeff leaves California and gets pulled into this world dominated by Tim adorers, connecting specifically with concert intern Allie (Imogen Poots, of “Fright Night” and “Jane Eyre”). As the two goes closer, Jeff begins to explore his father’s history, too, trying to figure out exactly what parts of Tim—if any that he wants to acknowledge—live on in him.
The film’s point, then, is a kind of self-making, self-discovery project, with a climax that comes in Jeff’s performance at the tribute concert (and that is Badgley actually singing, and yes, he is quite good)—but the problem with “Greetings from Tim Buckley” is that it keeps on going. The filmmakers insist on prolonging the scant narrative, and given how superfluous that excess material seems, the film loses its weight. Similarly unproductive is the romantic subplot between Jeff and Allie; Poots is a fine actress, but the film just doesn’t need the diversion.
You get a feeling, perhaps, that maybe the filmmakers weren’t allowed to show more of Jeff’s life before his decision to play the concert—perhaps because his estate refused it?—so they just made things up. So although Badgley gives an excellent performance, the film almost furthers the mystique of Jeff Buckley instead of illuminating it. Maybe you’ll understand the Jeff-Tim relationship more after “Greetings from Tim Buckley,” but it’s a slight presentation of two lives, not a heavy one. Only Badgley’s performance bears the necessary weight.
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