Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

I will follow Rufus Wainwright anywhere, but into the arms of Leonard Cohen? I am reluctant, reticent, even repulsed, and the movie is shakey and oddly constructed; you're 15 minutes into it and it still seems like the placeholder visuals and audio from the intro to the disc is still going. Has the movie actually started? When did that happen?

But Rufus tells the brilliant song about Leonard getting head from Janis Joplin in her unmade bed while "the limos wait in the street," and then there is Mr. Cohen wondering how he could be so "ungallant" as to identify Joplin in public as he did, and what made him do it? Joplin says she only makes love to handsome men, but in Leonard's case is willing to make an exception, and these sorts of lyrics still stick in my head 48 hours later. And I've played over and over the scene of a nervous and twitchy Antony performing a majestic Cohen song; I feel moonstruck, in love, as though I am 12 years old, with a pudgy tortured mix of a man, a Liberace without the sequins mixed with the vim of Joe Cocker. I don't know anything about Antony, but my next stop here is to go buy all his discs. It's great when movies deliver so much more than they promise.

Especially to anyone to whom Leonard Cohen strikes a discordant reaction, I recommend this wonderful experience.
"Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man."