Cohen assumed the role of Axel’s stepfather, providing financial and emotional support to the child. It was a turbulent relationship, full of ups and downs, that lasted eight years. Leonard and Marianne, doomed to failure from the beginning but immortalized in song – So Long, Marianne. Marianne soon met Cohen, another artist living in the island’s bohemian, expatriate community, and so began one of the most romanticized relationships of recent times.

A few days later, his father left Marianne for another woman. Little Axel, as he was nicknamed, arrived on the Greek island of Hydra with his parents when he was only four months old. Nonconformists, tormented, narcissistic, mystical, thirsty for adventure and lust – the creative process was the only thing that gave meaning to their lives. Two prominent figures of the counterculture who set out to light the world on fire through literature and poetry. His father was Axel Jensen, sometimes called the Jack Kerouac of Scandinavian literature. Behind his rough demeanor, I catch glimpses of a stunted sensibility, scattered thoughts, and a lifetime of inner pain.

“But I miss being with him.” He says little else. “Cohen had a dark side,” he blurts out suddenly. He walks briskly around the town once we arrive, but once we are sitting at a bar, he seems indifferent to our conversation, his mind in some other place. A heavy-set man, he shaves his head and wears a scraggly, gray beard.

Little escapes his stony, piercing gaze, but his face occasionally lights up with a tender and childlike delight. Jensen was serious for most of the trip and said little, perhaps because of his medication. One autumn morning, around the time of the film’s pre-pandemic premiere, Jensen agreed to take a car trip with me and his legal guardian to Larkollen, the coastal village in southeastern Norway where his mother was born.

The documentary was filmed shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic and could only be released in Norway and the US, but plans are now underway for a broader, international distribution. “It can be a bit difficult to remember the things you just want to forget… but now I live in a nice place,” he says in the film. Jensen tells the story of growing up with Cohen in the documentary film, Little Axel, directed by Fabien Greenberg and Bård Kjøge Rønning. His mother was Marianne Ihlen, who was one of singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen’s great loves and muses. The 63-year-old Jensen has been in and out of various mental health facilities since he turned 19. The house is part of a psychiatric facility near Oslo (Norway), in a tranquil location where bird songs and chirps are the only sounds to be heard. For the past few years, Axel Joachim Jensen has lived in a small, wooden house with a porch, where he likes to go out for a smoke, and a window with a view of meadows and pine forests.

Leonard cohen