Patched together from interviews and old home movies, this 100-minute documentary charts the 10-year romance between Leonard Cohen and the woman he called his 'Muse', Marianne Ihlen from Norway, whom he met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960.
There were other women - many of them, sometimes more than one a day. Free Love, fueled by drugs - acid, uppers, downers - was just an excuse for promiscuity, but promiscuity was mandatory in the 1960s. And not without casualties: suicides and deaths from overdoses. Marianne had a son by her first husband, Axel, whom we see as a happy child on the island. Like other children of that era, he ended in an institution.
Cohen has given us some great songs, and his dark gravelly voice is one of the iconic sounds of the last sixty years, but Nick Broomfield's unflinching documentary paints a portrait of an egotistical, self-destructive man who took up women and dropped them as casually as a Kleenex.
Three months before he died and knowing death was coming, he sent a love-letter to Marianne who was in her final days. So maybe, the man had a heart. His songs seem to say so, but his life rather less so.
There were other women - many of them, sometimes more than one a day. Free Love, fueled by drugs - acid, uppers, downers - was just an excuse for promiscuity, but promiscuity was mandatory in the 1960s. And not without casualties: suicides and deaths from overdoses. Marianne had a son by her first husband, Axel, whom we see as a happy child on the island. Like other children of that era, he ended in an institution.
Cohen has given us some great songs, and his dark gravelly voice is one of the iconic sounds of the last sixty years, but Nick Broomfield's unflinching documentary paints a portrait of an egotistical, self-destructive man who took up women and dropped them as casually as a Kleenex.
Three months before he died and knowing death was coming, he sent a love-letter to Marianne who was in her final days. So maybe, the man had a heart. His songs seem to say so, but his life rather less so.