Hallelujah, the Hebrew word of praise for the Lord, is all over the Old Testament. How strange, but how very typical of our contemporary neediness and confusion, that Leonard Cohen’s song of that name should have become a secular pop anthem for our times.

Daniel Geller and Dayna Golding’s innovative documentary, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, brings us a biography of the singer in relation to a single composition that took years to write, and would go on to have a life of its own. The filmmakers were fortunate in having a road map to follow in Alan Light’s book of 2012, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’, soon to be reissued in an updated edition. Their greatest obstacles were the licensing fees and agreements required to include more than 20 of Cohen’s songs, along with archival footage of interviews and concerts.