Film Review: Film follows 3 guitar legends on journey of influence, philosophy

Eric Lee/Sony Pictures Classics

Rockers (from left) Jack White, Jimmy Page and The Edge jam during filming of the documentary "It Might Get Loud."

"It Might Get Loud" rarely does.

The "guitar summit" documentary that brings together Led Zeppelin legend Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge and relative young gun Jack White opens with the White Stripes leader constructing a stringed instrument out of wire and a Coke bottle and ends with a rootsy version of "The Weight" rather than a fret-strangling jam. In between, director Davis Guggenheim (an Oscar-winner for the Al Gore eco-doc, "An Inconvenient Truth") wisely doesn't insist that his stars turn the volume up to 11 (perhaps because when The Edge saw "Spinal Tap," he reports, "I didn't laugh, I wept, it was so close to the truth").

Eric Lee/Sony Pictures Classics

Rockers (from left) Jack White, Jimmy Page and The Edge jam during filming of the documentary "It Might Get Loud."

Instead, Guggenheim provides the guitarists with a forum for their enthusiasms: White plays Son House's recording of "Grinning in Your Face" for moviegoers and sings the praises of the Flat Duo Jets, while Page spins what seems to be a vintage 45-rpm copy of Link Wray's "Rumble." The musicians also reveal something of their musical philosophies and techniques, as when The Edge admits he owes the signature percussive chime of his guitar strumming to "hardware" and "effects units."

The result is an extremely relaxed and unfailingly entertaining film that provides an informal history of rock and roll through the perspectives of its participants. The film's hidden track, so to speak, is the broader history lesson that accompanies its musical timeline, as Page discusses growing up in working-class Epsom, England, and The Edge (real name: David Howell Evans) bemoans the terroristic violence that inspired the 1983 U2 album, "War."

The vintage clips -- possibly familiar to YouTube devotees of the musicians -- are priceless; we see young Jimmy Page on black-and-white British TV in his teenage skiffle band (Page calls skiffle "rock-and-roll breast feeding"), and we're reminded that the magisterial U2 started out as skinny New Wavers with 'Til Tuesday hairdos. For Guggenheim's cameras, Page returns to Headley Grange, a former workhouse in Britain where "When the Levee Breaks" was recorded, and The Edge covers the Ramones' "Glad To See You Go" in the hallway of his old school. Wearing a sort of Peter Pan-during- Prohibition gangster outfit, White -- the most self-conscious of these "character guitarists" (Page's term) -- is accompanied for much of the film by an identically attired child, whom he refers to as his 9-year-old self.

One might ask: What's it all about, Davis? The true answer seems to be that Guggenheim thought it would be cool to hang out with famous rockers, which may be as good a justification for making a movie as any. In any case, it says something about the status of rock and roll in the pop-rap-and-country- dominated commercial music culture of 2009 that Jack White (at 34) is considered the only "young" guitarist around with the celebrity and credibility to be matched with Page, 65, and The Edge, 48.

Opening in Memphis only at the so-called "art house" of the Malco Ridgeway Four, the movie seems more likely to introduce old Led Zep fans to White's Raconteurs than vice versa; even Page, his lion's mane now polar bear white, seems to be waxing nostalgic when he alludes to the dangerous nature of rock and roll. Remembering when his teachers at school confiscated his guitar, he says, with sly comic menace: "It wasn't doing anybody harm. Not then, it wasn't."

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394

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