“Leonard Cohen:� I’m Your Hit Man

Critics have generally been kind to the concert documentary “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,� but I think they may have feared that slagging the movie meant slagging the man. Speaking as a huge Cohen fan, I found it an almost perfectly thorough disappointment.

Some critics did note that for a film ostensibly about the singer/songwriter/poet, he sure didn’t figure much in it. Cohen’s best moment comes when he reads the wry, generous introduction he wrote for the Chinese translation of “Beautiful Losers,� his (one presumes) drug-fueled, stream-of-consciousness, utterly unhinged ’60s novel about a love triangle. The rest of what he has to say covers pretty familiar territory if you know anything about the guy.

(Interestingly, in the film, Cohen concedes that revealing that his song “Chelsea Hotel No. 2� concerned a tryst with Janis Joplin was “ungallant,� making his later explication of the song “Suzanne� – that not everything in that song really happened – seem a bit disingenuous.)

So most of the film is given over to a tribute concert in which a number of singer/songwriters perform sort of Vegas-y, overwrought versions of Cohen tunes. Cohen’s material works precisely because he largely presented it in such a subtle, unadorned fashion; he never tried to sell the hell out of it. Cohen, who doesn’t even appear at the concert, performs but one song live, a fairly rote reading of “Tower of Song� with U2 noodling away in the background.

Additionally, many of the songs chosen, curiously enough, are rather minor offerings from his canon, with a shocking number of his undisputed masterpieces overlooked. No “Joan of Arc?� No “Famous Blue Raincoat?� or “Take This Longing?� No “Democracy� or “The Future?� Neophytes encountering Cohen for the first time, based on the bulk of the songs presented juxtaposed with the fawning hagiography, will be right for wondering what all the fuss is about.

Finally, this may be, visually, the most unintentionally ugly film I’ve ever seen – with its limited color palate, its intense close-ups and its wan, uninspired efforts to juice up the imagery, this may be the first movie to look better on an iPod than it does on the big screen.

How utterly wrong-headed are the visuals? The song "Sisters of Mercy" is accompanied by images of religious iconography; the song itself is about a threesome.

Given all this, perhaps Antony shouldn’t have accentuated so intensely the final lines of his song: “End this night/if it be your will.�