Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s respectful doc tells the story of the artist through the life of his 1984 song, by turns a modern prayer, symbolist poem and divine gift
In the mid-1980s, Leonard Cohen met Bob Dylan for coffee in a
Paris cafe. In the course of the conversation, Dylan asked how long it had taken to write the song Hallelujah; Cohen, embarrassed, said that it had been about seven years. Then Cohen asked Dylan how long he had spent on one of his own compositions. “Fifteen minutes,” said his rival, without missing a beat.
Pundits now suspect that Bob Dylan was lying, keen to foster the image of himself as a freewheeling genius, a man who tossed off casual masterpieces as naturally as taking a leak. But Cohen was not being entirely honest either. In fact, he had toiled at Hallelujah for nearly a decade, filling his notebooks with 180 different verses and a rumoured 250 versions of each line. Even when it was recorded, the song was not quite done and dusted. One might even say it remains a work in progress today.