Marianne Ihlen, as seen in Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (Roadside Attractions)

Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love is ostensibly an elegy to the romance between troubadour/lothario Leonard Cohen and his 1960s girlfriend/muse Marianne Ihlen, but if their names appeared on a poster in a way that revealed their real weight in the film they would read LEONARD (& Marianne). Although the film hypes their love affair, Ihlen remains a distant, mostly silent, and rather sad figure, and we get to know the intense, brooding singer far better than his consort and supposed inspiration.

Well-known star profiler and provocateur Nick Broomfield delivers a more subdued piece of work than usual here, although he can’t resist sharing that he himself bedded Ihlen in his younger years. Presumably the Ihlen liaison afforded Broomfield access to gorgeous 1960s footage of Cohen and Ihlen’s halcyon days on the Greek island of Hydra, where the Canadian writer and Norwegian divorcee fell in love. Crisp black-and-white and honey-dipped, saturated color film make the couple and their surroundings look fresh, vital, and ravishing.

The idyll couldn’t last. Cohen got his start as a poet and novelist, but his career really took off when folk sensation Judy Collins encouraged him to sing his own deep, dark lyrics, beginning with “Suzanne.” Suddenly Cohen was on tour, becoming a star and embarking on affairs with anything that satisfied his “appetite,” a yen he discusses in self-appreciative terms over Broomfield’s cuts of naked hippies frolicking in a love-in. Admittedly self-conscious as a non-creative surrounded by artists, Ihlen receded into the background of Cohen’s life. By the time Cohen introduces his signature farewell ballad “So Long Marianne” by disparaging their relationship onstage, we know it’s over. After all, as he said of himself, “I was always leaving. I was always trying to get away.”

Ihlen’s presence bookends the film, first vividly on Hydra and then touchingly toward the end, where she sits in the front row taking in Cohen’s 2009 comeback concert in London. In between we see lots of the singer: interrupting a concert to shave backstage while high on LSD, fielding the advances of a scarily hot-to-trot woman at a party, and holding forth on love during a late episode as a Buddhist monk. Cohen led quite a life and may well deserve his own documentary not refracted through the prism of a relationship that did not always bring out his best. To wit, the note Cohen sent Ihlen on her deathbed is read aloud as a sign of his magnanimity and wisdom. But like his goodbye song, it sounds a little like a kiss-off, a farewell to a woman we never really got to know. So long Marianne. With Leonard, you didn’t stand much of a chance.