Watching the lovely new tribute concert/interview movie Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, which with any luck will soon come to a theater near you (these days, that can take a lot of luck), I was reminded of how Leonard Cohen, more than any other single musician, is an artist I came to through the movies — and, in fact, have kept coming to, over and over again. Through the years, his songs have been arrayed on soundtracks in such splendid yet diverse ways that it's almost as if he'd been placed on earth to be the insinuating lyric bard of the cinema.

I'd hardly even heard of Cohen when, at college in the late '70s, I first encountered his tender, sleepy growl on the soundtrack of Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The weird thing is, the songs fit the movie so perfectly (''He was just some Joseph looking for a manger''), fusing with the wintry woodland shimmer of Altman's images so that the whole film drifted across your eyes and ears in a beautiful narcotic daze, that it hardly even occurred to me that the songs had an existence of their own. They were just part of the exquisite Western dreamscape of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

As it turned out, they were all taken from Cohen's first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, which was released in 1968, three years before Altman had the inspiration to sprinkle them onto the McCabe soundtrack. But even after I bought the album, I didn't necessarily consider myself a die-hard Cohen fan. I played the record every so often, but by temperament I'd never been particularly drawn to sensitive singer-songwriters, and I was most content to experience the quiet rapture of songs like ''Suzanne'' or ''Sisters of Mercy'' simply by going back to see McCabe again and again. That, to me, is where the music belonged.

It wasn't until the '90s that I reconnected with Leonard Cohen. I was watching Exotica, Atom Egoyan's moody and labyrinthine strip-club fantasia, and there, once again, was that voice: deep and smoky, the sound of a somnambulist hipster, yet not truly a singer's voice — more like an aurally magnified whisper, as if it had some tantalizing secret to impart. It came as a slight shock to realize that I still thought of Cohen as the priestly muse of McCabe, only now, here he was singing ''Everybody Knows,'' his impassioned ode to cultural ruin, and it was being used as bump-and-grind theme music for Mia Kirshner's mysterious jailbait stripper, a lost girl in a tartan skirt who acted out her demons on stage. (You may remember — or try to forget — that ''Everybody Knows'' is used in a similar programmatic fashion in Pump Up the Volume, where it punches up the ferment of Christian Slater's cloying, babbly ersatz-rebel pirate DJ.) The mood of Exotica couldn't have been more different from that of McCabe, yet, once again, a Leonard Cohen song didn't just define a movie, it all but became the movie.

Why is that? I think it's because there's something deep down in Cohen's music that speaks, at once, to the secular and the mystical, the worldly and the lordly, in a way that mirrors the sacramental, life-glimpsed-in-the-dark realism of movies themselves. He has always been a composer in the tradition of Kurt Weill, setting scalding, angsty lyrics to melodies of insidious beauty, and that has the effect of allowing his voice to seem as if it's flowing out of the consciousness of the movie around it. More than a voice, he becomes the film's soul, the hidden plaint of whatever we're watching.

Nowhere is that more true than in Natural Born Killers, the great, stream-of-media-madness Oliver Stone fever dream that features Cohen's music every bit as prominently — and indelibly — as McCabe & Mrs. Miller did. This is a movie that people could debate forever (and have), but if I had to say why I think it's the single greatest film of the '90s, I think I'd start simply by asking you to watch the opening few minutes, with its ominous cross-cutting of desert animals, diners, devils, and two redneck-hippie killers with their backs to us, and to bask in the gorgeous shudder of the music (''Baby, I've been waitin', I've been waitin' night and day''). It's Cohen's sublime song ''Waiting for the Miracle,'' and as you listen to its deliberate, cascading lament, that voice in the wilderness aching for a miracle that never comes, the song changes — defines — the meaning of everything around it. Natural Born Killers is inevitably talked about as a movie that deals with violence, celebrity, media, and their demonic interaction, but in this song we hear something else: a hunger, an almost spiritual longing that speaks to the forces that are driving the film's two badland psychos. They are not, in truth, ''natural born killers.'' They are killers who were made, and the music speaks to what's missing in them — and, by implication, in us: the soul that's leached away by a society where images, and the longing for sensation, have overtaken reality.

''Waiting for the Miracle'' comes from Cohen's 1992 album The Future, and by this point in his career, when he had passed his mid-50s, his voice had deepened even further, acquiring a throaty, raspy, old-whiskey grain. He sounds like Dylan crossed with Barry White, and Stone, working with soundtrack collaborator Trent Reznor, tapped this and several other songs on The Future to give Natural Born Killers, for all its blood and frenzy and satire, the underlying quality of a requiem. The slow waltz ''Anthem'' turns the climactic prison riot into a deliverance; the album's magnificently catchy title track, ''The Future,'' plays over the eye-popping closing credits in a way that crystallizes the movie's themes — the perils and addictions that take us out of ourselves.

If I sound like I'm turning Leonard Cohen into a doomsday artist, let us not forget that he is also the troubadour of Shrek. His majestic hymn ''Hallelujah,'' heard in John Cale's great soaring cover version (the soundtrack CD, for contractual reasons, features Rufus Wainwright's), is part of what makes this beauty-and-the-beast cartoon so moving. Once again, a Cohen song murmurs something to the audience that the movie itself can't: in this case, the happiness that a grouchy green ogre feels when he's filled with love.

I've often thought about which Leonard Cohen song that hasn't, until now, been used in a movie I'd most like to hear on a soundtrack. I think I'd have to go to the well of The Future again and pick ''Democracy,'' his audacious martial-beat political epic in which, with a ''hope'' so playful it sounds a wink away from sincerity, he offers the telling refrain, ''Democracy is coming...to the USA!'' Simply to hear that song in 2006 is to imagine the great movie that might be wrapped around it.

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