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Trailer for "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man"

The promoter Hal Willner has made a specialty of organizing tribute concerts, organizing eclectic bunches of performers to interpret music by a single writer or similar connection. (One of my favorites was Stay Awake, a late 1980s collection of covers of songs from Walt Disney movies, including Tom Waits’ memorably scary version of “Heigh Ho” from Snow White.) This film is built around such a concert staged in Sydney, Australia in early 2005 devoted to the work of Montreal-born novelist/poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen. The guest list is less varied than that on the Cohen tribute album that came out in the early 1990s: Close to half the performers are related to each other (Rufus and Martha Wainwright, their mother and aunt the McGarrigle Sisters, mother and son Linda and Teddy Thompson). Cohen’s distinctive sepulchral croon is not easily imitated, and no one here chooses to, though it’s a lack that renders some of the tunes a bit colorless. There are a few standouts (notably Antony, of Antony and the Johnsons, lending his eerie, quivering falsetto to the perfectly suited “If It Be Your Will”) and a few disappointments (it’s a sad surprise to see that Cohen’s work is so poorly suited to Nick Cave), with the bulk at least respectably performed. More intriguing are segments in which the 71-year-old Cohen himself is interviewed, discussing his life from his childhood in Montreal through his 1990s stay at a Buddhist monastery. At once elegant, reflective and quietly self-mocking, he is his own best interpreter even when not singing, and it’s a shame this film doesn’t simply let him speak at more length.