Jeff Buckley was ashamed to be in PEOPLE’s ’50 Most Beautiful’ issue

Jeff Buckley was never comfortable with fame.

The singer-songwriter, who died unexpectedly at the age of 30, struggled with his success and some of the more shallow aspects of being a star throughout his career.

A new documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, reveals just how much his newfound exposure plagued him, particularly when he was chosen for PEOPLE magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” issue.

In the doc, Buckley’s former girlfriend and musician Joan Wasser remembers his extreme embarrassment when he appeared in the magazine, showing a picture she still has of Buckley’s page in the issue, over which he wrote, “Kill me.”

Wasser also shares a story of how Buckley took her with him to buy every issue of the magazine they could find, spending hundreds of dollars in the process, to try to keep anyone from seeing the page with his image.

Featuring raw interviews with his former girlfriends Wasser and Rebecca Moore and his mother, Mary Guibert, director Amy Berg’s new documentary is an exploration of Buckley’s life and untimely death from accidental drowning.

It chronicles his challenging childhood with his absent father and young mother (she was only 17 years old when she got pregnant), as well as his battle to remain authentic with his music while dealing with the demands of fame. Additionally, it digs into his mental health struggles and his strong feelings of imposter syndrome, particularly while receiving praise from fellow musicians.

Buckley died in 1997 after formally releasing just one studio album, 1994’s Grace, which became a hit in Europe and a modest success in the U.S. He was working on recording a second album at the time of his death.

Brad Pitt, who at one point wanted to play Buckley in a biopic, produced the film through his company Plan B Entertainment.