It Might Get Loud

With It Might Get Loud Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, The First Year) has made his best documentary film yet, a skilfully edited biographical triptych which brings together the stories, insights, and musical talents of guitar legends Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), The Edge (U2), and Jack White (The White Stripes). The film is a searching and intelligent exploration of the artistic process as it has unfolded for each of these very different personalities. There is no mindless genuflection before their talents, only real analysis of their development in the context of their times, circumstances, and dispositions. Nor is there any of the gratuitous exposure of emotional extremes and/or scandalous episodes we normally encounter with this genre. Psychological revelation remains riveted to the point; every aspect of life, from early influences through periods of self-doubt to moments of sudden illumination remain entirely within the orbit of the artistic goal, which brings a sort of literary unity to the project as a whole. The three meet, discuss influences and approaches, swap anecdotes and jam together, but the real genius of the film is in its careful blend of each man's separate story, told in his own words and shot with great attention to the aesthetic elements that accompany any artistic trajectory. The camera is sensitive to atmosphere, to aspects of longing and nostalgia, to the seductive beauty of the instrument itself. From the opening shot of Jack White constructing a home-made guitar out of a bit of wood, some wire, and a coke bottle on the porch of a Tennessee farmhouse, to the improvised performance of In My Time of Dying towards the end, the film delivers scene after scene of fascinating and sometimes (for music lovers) ecstatic material - Jack composing and performing an original song on camera, or leaving smears of blood on his guitar; The Edge describing artistic revelation in terms of trees, of the importance of jumping off into the unknown; Jimmy being interviewed on British television as a boy interested in biological research, playing air guitar to Link Wray; fantastic clips of Zeppelin, of Top of the Pops in the sixties, of U2 in a sea of thousands. Each is located in his early environment - Jimmy as an art student in 60's London, The Edge as a schoolboy in depressed 70's Dublin, and Jack haunting broken-down rock-averted hip-hop Detroit; each describes his growing addiction to music, the seizing upon new sounds, the development of a personal aesthetic rooted in cultural conditions, and the near fetishizing of the object of the guitar, conceived so differently by all three. It is the sheer range of approach covered by these artists that becomes more and more apparent; Jimmy's attitude is frankly erotic, joyful, totally living at every point; The Edge pursues a more redemptive angle - he speaks of searching and belief, of trying to make sense of a senseless environment; Jack is the embodiment of a sort of seething punk-energy, a defiance, and a refusal: when you become satisfied, he says, you just die. Statements like this one are rendered more definitive by their contrasts, so that we really see the stylistic development of each artist in a kind of relief, distinct, and yet complementary, resonant with a sense of shared passion. It's an illuminating film, elegant and coherent, with as much to say about artistic commitment generally as about its famous subjects in particular. And the music is just - sublime.