Biography can create the most heightened sense of drama. Just at the moment SBS On Demand is showing a streamer about that great singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, which manages to present him in his dealings with that extraordinary literary couple George Johnston, the author of My Brother Jack, and his wife Charmian Clift.

Some baby boomers remember the original Rolling Stone review in the late 1960s that made them rush out and order Songs of Leonard Cohen from America. It said if Leonard Cohen wasn’t better than Dylan he was every bit as good.

And remarkably it was true. ‘He was just some Joseph looking for a manger… like he had given up the holy game of poker… I’m just a station on your way, I know I’m not your lover… Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.’

So Long, Marianne is a Norwegian/Canadian co-production with Alex Wolff as Leonard Cohen and Thea Sofie Loch Næss as Marianne, the Norwegian girl who comes to adore him and is loved in turn despite the poet’s scarifying devotion to his work. The mini-series announces that it is based on the life stories and it includes among the contributors Jo Nesbo, the Nordic thriller writer who has written a couple of masterpieces in his day.

Alex Wolff as the poet who becomes a songwriter is superb if a bit boyish and Thea Sofie Loch Næss acts like an angel as Marianne, dripping with love and proclaiming that she is a viking and impregnable. There are scenes shot in black and white set in English-speaking Montreal with Cohen’s elegant and intimidating mother and scenes in Oslo with the passive-aggressive mother of Marianne. In the background there’s Marianne’s former partner who is – with bells on – ‘no mensch’.

So Long, Marianne has the weird quality of a true life story you only know bits of. There is a superb scene where George Johnston played with absolute credibility by Noah Taylor tells Cohen that he has to keep living and writing. Anna Torv in a superb performance as Charmian Clift tells Marianne that she loves her children but what of the life of the writer: she’s leaving Hydra and going back to Australia.

It is a reminder of the heroism and horror of the history we have emerged from. Everyone who has a sense of the moment in the history of popular culture where a Jewish Canadian rewrote the rule book should be grateful for it.

Yes, you do suspect that some of the songs Alex Wolff sings were written later than the early 1960’s of the action but it doesn’t matter. And there is an extraordinary maturity in the early songs and Cohen was in his thirties when he made his first album.

So Long, Marianne is magnificently produced by Ingeborg Klyve and Tony Wood, and directed by Øystein Karlsen and Bronwen Hughes. It reminds you of how the Scandi crime shows made the civilisation that produced Ibsen (in Norway) and Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, and The Killing and its successors in Denmark was one of the great cultural centres of the earth.

But So Long, Marianne is precisely what we want from a miniseries and it in fact leaves an overtly cinematic venture like Cuarón’s Disclaimer for dead, as it has none of the improbable violations of realism and it also has an ungainsayable credibility that Baby Reindeer for all its brilliance and controversy lacks.

This is the true life story of a great artist who is torn between his love for a woman and his impassioned desire to realise his destiny as an artist, ultimately as a singer-songwriter in the most archetypal way.

The New York scenes have a soaring quality as John Hammond realises Leonard Cohen will be some sort of star and Alex Wolff’s performance gains in authority as the destiny seems more viable. The scenes at the Chelsea Hotel have walk-on parts for Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, for Nico and Judy Collins and a red-haired young woman who asks the whereabouts of Kris Kristofferson.

It’s that kind of television with a very dynamic command of its documentary aspects and everyone in So Long, Marianne gives it weight and scope. Noah Taylor as George Johnston is wonderful and Anna Torv as Charmian Clift is marvellous in her poise and understatement.

Actors like Cate Blanchett who operate – grandly – through a principle of excess should look at how naturally and quietly Torv plays the part of a tragic and impressive woman. Her farewell note which we overhear is beautifully thrown away.

And in the midst of all this there is Thea Sofie Loch Næss as Marianne. She not only speaks beautiful English, she understands it intimately as a dramatic idiom so there is no veil of foreignness. It’s a performance that should be honoured at the highest level.

But everyone in So Long, Marianne is superb. It’s one of those too rare bits of television that has the breath of life.

Many Australians will be familiar with the Charmian Clift/George Johnston aspect of this story from Clift’s essays and from Nadia Wheatley’s superb biography of her. But it’s quite breathtaking to have their marriage – and their very different frailties and strengths – indicated so pungently without any milking.

And it’s very moving to see Alex Wolff’s Leonard Cohen grow into something anyone might fear, and at the same time be full of kindness and poignancy. You understand the cost in every note and stumble, every touch of brutality in the midst of authentic love.

It succeeds in being that almost impossible thing: a vibrant portrait of the artist put together by a team of people who know that the central figures are involved in something that in T.S. Eliot’s phrase ‘costs not less than everything’.

We should thank God for SBS that they are showing So Long, Marianne on demand for nothing, so we can all enjoy this beguiling story of a Jewish man from Montreal, dazzled by the island of Hydra and by a profoundly good-natured girl who puts all her heart into wrestling with the spirit that makes him such a grand and unlikely rock singer.

That this Norwegian/Canadian venture manages not to put a foot wrong in handling all this intrinsically tricky matter really is amazing.