Filmed appreciations of potentially great artists who “die young and leave a beautiful corpse” are many. If these post mortems have a common thread, it’s the difficulty in separating the myth from the musician, painter, actor or writer. And the more “beautiful” the corpse, the greater the hype and the harder that becomes.

Amy Berg’s “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” is about the James Dean-gorgeous singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley. An almost uncategorizable guitarist and singer with a piercing falsetto and four-octave range who could rock out to Led Zeppelin and cover Nirvana and yet let us hear his adoration of Judy Garland, Nina Simone and the singular Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Buckley sang and wrote insightful, soulful and self-revealing folk-rock ballads.

His story is marked by brief triumph and lingering tragedy. Buckley only finished one critically-acclaimed album, with “Grace” worshipped by everyone from David Bowie to Alanis Morissette. He’s best-known for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which topped the charts over a decade after his death, at 31 in 1997.

And he’s famous for being the son of another acclaimed singer-songwriter who died very young, Tim Buckley, a man he only met once and someone Jeff spent his career trying to separate himself from in interviews, many of which are sampled here.

Berg, the Oscar-nominated director of the “West of Memphis” doc about the West Memphis Three, with a Janis Joplin documentary and a damning Mormon church takedown among her credits, puts a lot of Buckley’s story in his own words, leaning most heavily on his mother, girlfriends and bandmates to flesh out his story.

You have to read a Buckley bio or his Wikipedia page to realize how disingenuous his “don’t call me Tim Buckley’s kid” and “next question” stance regarding his famous father. Buckley was raised “Scottie Moorhead,” taking his stepdad’s name.

He chose to become “Jeff Buckley.” And his big break was performing at a 1991 tribute concert for his father, the son weeping as he sang a song his father wrote about him and the mother (he married Mary Guibert when they were teens) that Tim Buckley abandoned when she got pregnant.

Jeff signed to Columbia Records, “Dylan’s label,” and Springsteen’s. He was yet another singer-songwriter given that “next Bob Dylan” hype.

Berg had not only a potential chip-off-the-old-icon star-in-the-making figure to profile. She had a “complicated” character to try and unravel, a poetic young man who fell for theater actress Rebecca Moore, moved on from her to pursue singer/songwriter Aimee Mann, among others, before falling for fellow musician Joan Wasser.

“It’s Never Over,” a play on the title of his song “I Know It’s Over,” hews to Buckley’s stated wish to interviewers for people to get past his lineage and his looks and appreciate “my music.” Much of Buckley’s musical output is sampled in performance and in recordings as we see pages from his notebooks — often rendered into graphics — illustrating the tune and underscoring the careworn crafted lyrics.

“There’s the moon asking to stay
Long enough for the clouds to fly me away
Oh, it’s my time coming,
I’m not afraid
Afraid to die…”

When you write songs like “Grace” with lines about your mortality, and then you die by drowning during an impulsive plunge into a Memphis river while singing Led Zeppelin (“Whole Lotta Love”), when your androgynous beauty beguiles girlfriends, fans and record execs alike, and your dad died young too, it’s no wonder that Buckley “lore” overwhelms any attempt to size up the talent and space occupied in the culture by someone like Jeff Buckley.

The archival interviews with Jeff reveal some, but not all. Berg’s film gets intimate when it lets us hear loving or even testy phone messages left for his mother and amusing when we learn of the comical old fashioned radio drama he created for his outgoing answering machine message.

And it gives Buckley fans lots of the music and some of the details and color of the life that Buckley lived. Will it create new fans? Buckley’s fame and reputation only truly exploded after his death and after post mortem hype by Rolling Stone and others. He could be due to a new cycle of interest and famous musician endorsements.

Or maybe his reputation will settle in exactly the same spot his father’s did — lauded after a premature death, his voice, looks and reputation forever preserved at that moment in time, a great “might have been” worshipped for what never quite was.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Jeff Buckley, Mary Guibert, Rebecca Moore, Michael Tighe, Joan Wasser and Ben Harper

Credits: Directed by Amy Berg. An HBO Films production, a Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:46