Director Nick Broomfield has always been a major onscreen presence in his documentaries — turning the struggles and challenges he encounters making them into a fascinating part of each story.  But in Marianne & Leonard:  Words Of Love, an emotionally complex story of a poet and his muse, Broomfield’s exploration of Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen feels even more personal.  Broomfield himself had a brief relationship with Marianne, who was a lifelong love of Cohen, inspiring one of the most tender break-up songs ever written.  Made after their deaths, this film is a tribute to them, their enduring romance, and the culture that sparked it.

Broomfield provides an entertaining review of Cohen’s initial struggles with confidence, his growing success, his infamous womanizing, his self-reflective period in a Buddhist monastery, and his later financial struggles after his manager embezzled his entire fortune.

Perhaps because Cohen’s life has been so well-documented, what becomes the most interesting but considerably slighter thread of the film is the role of Marianne and the Greek island of Hydra — and the formative if complex roles they played in Cohen’s life.  Hydra became a bohemian haven in the ‘60s, offering artists a chance to live out the acid-dropping, nudity-embracing, hedonistic, free-loving philosophies of the era’s counterculture.  It sounds utopian — and was, in that it couldn’t exist as described.  Hydra had a calamitously destructive quality on many people, including Marianne, who struggled to define herself outside of the status of Cohen’s “muse.”

“With a softened lens, British documentarian Nick Broomfield adoringly examines a fascinating relationship in a fascinating time that saw Cohen transition from a poet to a world-class songwriter,” says Mark Dujsik of Mark Reviews Movies.

Broomfield explores the relationship between Marianne and Cohen through interviews, archival photographs and footage, and correspondence between Marianne and Cohen, including footage of her being read a farewell message from Cohen before she died.  He also uses personal photographs and recollections to elevate our understanding of this never-ending Summer Of Love, the artist/muse relationship, and the occasionally devastating side-effects of both.

1:37, rated R for some drug material, sexual references and brief nudity.