It Might Get Loud
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Editor: Greg Finton
Producers: Thomas Tull, Davis Guggenheim, Peter Afterman, Lesley Chilcott
Featuring: Jimmy Page, The Edge, Jack White
When Gods meet, you want there to be thunder. The guitar-centric documentary It Might Get Loud certainly raises the promise of a heavy Something – bringing together three generations of strummers represented by Jack White of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs, Dave Evans (aka The Edge of U2), and Jimmy Page of The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. Put them in a room together with guitars, cameras, and a few decades of rock-and-roll history between them, and you expect…I don’t know, but that primal, ineloquent anticipation is something all of them have stirred in audiences while their fingers were on the strings.
What instead happens is three gifted professionals have a mutually-admiring chat about their work and play a few songs. Without setting too high a standard, you do want a documentary to capture and preserve some moment of magic. And when you can see how keenly The Edge studies Page as he plays, or watch the three of them feel their way into an impromptu cover of The Band’s classic The Weight, you do get that backstage pass thrill of glimpsing something intimate and special behind the façade of musical fame. But this meeting, which was dubbed “The Summit”, and constitutes roughly a quarter of the film, is not rough or raucous – there’s no controversy, no sex, no wild destinations. They’re sitting in comfortable chairs, by God. And without turning this inspirational set-up into a strong core statement, director Davis Guggenheim delivers us a film which is absolutely affectionate, frequently intriguing and insightful, but must finally be judged thusly – it does not rock.
Maybe this is by design, because what the movie is most ultimately interested is not performance but process. It provides a brief overview of each individual’s career, and follows them in their lives to get some taste of just how they make the sounds in their head come out the speakers. In this section, the dry data usually isn’t captivating (most of us can get on Wikipedia these days), but strong character emerges out of the biographical sketch. When the middle-aged Edge returns to his old school and sees the notice board where he first glimpsed the flier posted by drummer Larry Mullen, it gives you that electric echo, remembering that long ago he once got together with some kids to be in a band, be cool, and meet girls.
Among the three, Page is the worldly bard – we see him as a schoolboy playing skiffle music (“You only needed to know one chord!”) on a local TV show in England, mastering every style as a busy session player, then making a profound lifelong communion with his instrument, so that his fingers can now effortlessly turn blues into epic poetry. The Edge is the restless sonic explorer and architect of U2’s legendary sound, manically experimenting with amps and pedals to create a perfect channel from his imagination. And White is the oddball zealot of a one-man denomination of roots music worship, inventing one masochistic purification ritual after another. We watch one performance where he literally leaves blood on his guitar.
White frequently seems to be operating in his own movie, or perhaps even his own universe, one that can feel maddeningly contrived but driven by powerful impulses. He travels the countryside with a child in identical clothes, which he identifies as himself at a younger age; he builds a guitar out of junk, he bangs out a song on a plinky old piano in a decaying house, he listens rapturously to a vinyl record by blues singer Son House. The guitar literature that inspired these individuals makes for some of the most involving viewing – Page can describe the legendary instrumental Rumble by Link Wray and his Ray Men down to the action of every string, memorized like a favorite Bible chapter.
One of the trio says of the guitar: “I don’t know if I picked it, or if it picked me.” All three could have said it – although The Summit brings less epiphany than you would want, it does amply make the case that they have a lifelong bond with their instrument, their music, and rock and roll; and that they’ve had the time to see and appreciate that. The Edge says that when he first saw the satirical Spinal Tap he didn’t laugh, he wept, for how true it was to what had happened to his beloved rock music at that time.
What It Might Get Loud does best is provide those hints of what drove each of these men – something of the times and places of their youths, something of their era, and something more unique, that they perhaps didn’t even understand about themselves until this instrument in their hands amplified it. It could be this is all the movie needed to do, and it is a commendable accomplishment. But I wanted that Loud they teased us with. Did the chairs have to be so comfortable? These men work on their feet.