Leonard Cohen is thirty years old and back in Montreal, the city he calls his home for renewing what he terms his "neurotic affiliations," when this black-and-white portrait catches up with him. Directors Donald Brittain and Don Owen follow him loosely rather than formally, watching him read his poetry to a crowd that responds with real enthusiasm, walk the streets of the neighborhoods he grew up around, and settle into a three-dollar-a-night hotel room where he is filmed taking a bath. There is no narrator steering the material toward a thesis about his career; the camera simply stays close while Cohen talks, performs, and drifts through his own city before the novels and songs that would make him famous had fully arrived. The informality is the point: this is Cohen as a working poet in his hometown, not yet the figure later documentaries would need to explain. It runs under an hour and works as a document of a specific moment, a young writer between reputations, filmed plainly and left alone.