“I found myself in a shabby room in the Royalton Hotel trying to finish ‘Hallelujah’ and not being able to, and I remember being in my underwear on the carpet banging my head against the floor and saying, ‘I can’t do it anymore, it’s too hard.’” Ratso’s response to this punishing story of wrestling with the angel of songwriting is to ask, “Do you think anyone takes this much care with a pop song?” Cohen’s reaction is pitch-perfect incredulity. Cohen tells him about the difficulty he had in writing the song.

They also provide the only time when Cohen is struck speechless by one of Ratso’s questions.

They were documentary gold, and sections from them occur throughout the film. During that time, he conducted numerous interviews, all of which were recorded on cassette, and he made them available to the filmmakers. Their relationship began in 1974 when Sloman was writing a feature for Rolling Stone magazine and it continued for the next 42 years. Sloman plays Boswell to Cohen’s Dr Johnson. “You’re just trying to lay it out as accurately as you can.” The experience is the experience of work and failure,” he tells Ratso. “There hardly is a first thought it’s all sweat. Leonard says the old Beat philosophy “first thought, best thought” never worked for him. But Ratso’s playful exaggeration is close to Cohen’s own view of songwriting. This connection resulted in access to the voluminous notebooks Cohen kept as he obsessively worked on the lyrics to the song the music journalist Larry “Ratso” Sloman thinks that it may have had as many as 180 verses. Cohen approved their film only a year before his death and along with that approval came the cooperative involvement of Robert Kory, the trustee of the Cohen Family Trust. The secret to making a good documentary is access to people and material, and the directors were blessed in this regard. It is an irresistible way to open a film about a man and a song that have made an indelible mark on contemporary music. He’s not singing as much as he’s performing a performance, a role he had played so many times it had become a ritual. It is classic Cohen: down on his knees, talk-singing, and placing an exaggerated emphasis on the “do you” conclusion of the song’s third line about not really caring for music. Among the 28 songs on the playlist that evening was “Hallelujah,” his monumental love song about the desires entertained by both body and soul. It shows Leonard Cohen performing in what turned out to be his final concert in Auckland, New Zealand, on December 21, 2013. Hallelujah, the documentary, opens with an ending.

Words to the song hallelujah by kd lang