Beginning with Jack White of The White Stripes literally building an instrument out of a scrap of wood, a soft drink bottle, some nails and a pick-up – 'who says you need to buy a guitar?" he notes with sly triumph – It Might Get Loud is a celebration of the electric guitar through the playing and observations of three celebrated proponents. Neatly spaced, perhaps too neatly, over successive decades, The Edge (U2), Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) and White offer themselves up both individually and as a rare trio to director David Guggenheim.
The filmmaker, who is best known for the Al Gore-fronted climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has to deal with another inconvenient truth with this story, and that is that there is a long history of rock documentaries which are worshipful and by the numbers; the genre has legions of forgettable outings. So at once he’s trying to avoid the stigma of the mere rock documentary, yet he’s also trying to make the best one yet seen.
His three subjects certainly help out. The access in the individual strands is genuinely rare: The Edge walks the camera through Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive School, where U2 formed in the mid 1970s, Page strolls through the rooms of Headley Grange, the English manor house where Led Zeppelin recorded 'Stairway to Heaven', while White plays influential songs from his youth to an identically dressed nine-year-old version of himself.
White, in effect, is performing – he’s defying documentary convention and you kind of wish that Guggenheim had joined him. Instead there’s a regal weight to the three coming together on a soundstage to play together, with each being trailed by a camera crew in their car like prize fighters headed for a title bout. But despite White’s odd hint of orneriness, they play together nicely both literally and figuratively. 'Technology is a destroyer of truth," insists White early on, but he never says a word when The Edge deploys a veritable sideboard of effects pedals and gizmos to manipulate his tone; no-one even smirks when Page produces his somewhat ludicrous twin neck guitar.
Guggenheim paints each man as the product of his environment and the archival material is impressive. A teenage Page, playing skiffle on British television in the late 1950s, politely tells an interviewer that when he grows up, 'I want to do biological research". If you consider Californian Groupies (1969-79) a legitimate scientific field, then he may well have been true to his word. Guggenheim catches their distinct playing tones – distorted and overblown for White, grandiose and electric for Page, sepulchral for The Edge – but doesn’t really determine how they might be reflections of their character.
Perhaps that would have required a feature in full for each participant, but the most curious thing about It Might Get Loud is that there’s simply not a great deal of footage of the trio playing together. They teach each other the odd song from the back catalogue, notably the opening chords of U2’s 'I Will Follow", but they never ascend to a closer understanding. Maybe they needed that great unmentioned bogeyman – a frontman – to knock them into shape?
Ultimately this is just a very good rock documentary. It’s simply too respectful to remake the genre, and when in doubt it falls back on the guitar’s inherent mysticism – 'you caress it," remarks the softly spoken Page, 'like a woman". Still, in this video game era of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the hard won authenticity of the three musicians shines through. They’re the real thing.
