Soon after Sha’Carri Richardson looks right at the camera in the new Nike ad “So Win,” you hear the telltale sounds of one of the most famous guitar riffs in history. Nike dropped the commercial during the Super Bowl, a seemingly apt occasion for a celebration of women athletes. It’s a typical Nike sales pitch, even if I’m still a bit dazed and confused that this ode to female excellence is set to “Whole Lotta Love,” the Led Zeppelin song in which Robert Plant promises, among other things, that he’s “gonna give you every inch of my love.”
That particular lyric isn’t in the commercial, but you hear it and much more of Plant’s moaning, groaning and baby-please beseeching in the new documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin.” A hagiographic look at the group’s beginnings, the movie is as straightforward as it is headbangingly diverting. A smooth assemblage of new and archival material, it introduces Led Zep’s own fab four — Plant (vocals), Jimmy Page (guitar), John Paul Jones (bass, keyboard) and John Bonham (drums) — and sketches in their background, revisiting how they got into music and joined forces. After two hooky hours, it wraps up in January 1970 with a rousing concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall and Plant vowing “you will be mine.”
Origin stories tend to be inherently appealing, particularly for viewers already invested in the artist. “Becoming Led Zeppelin” works especially hard to please — including, it seems, its own subjects. The movie might not be an official authorized portrait, but it plays like one, as it skitters over the group’s early highs, steers clear of the band’s excesses and dodges anything unpleasant, scandalous or potentially illegal. The focus here is on the guys’ youthful self-invention and giddy discovery, on who they were before “Stairway to Heaven,” before the private plane called the Starship 1 and the Madison Square Garden gigs. It’s also, instructively, Zeppelin before Bonham’s accidental death in 1980 at age 32.
The movie is anchored by a newly uncovered audio interview with Bonham and by contemporary chats with Page, Plant and Jones. Notably, the three surviving members seem to have been interviewed separately, and are usually parked in similar elaborately carved wood chairs in a plush, somewhat gloomy space kitted out with candelabras and Oriental rugs. The location suggests that the royals have graciously granted you an audience, but the results are generally warm, relaxed and, every so often, a touch melancholic. The location visually connects the men, creating a kind of virtual reunion that helps unify the material as each musician strolls down memory lane amid a trove of visual and audio material.
The director Bernard MacMahon and his co-writer, Allison McGourty, have gone deep into the archives and, with help from the editor Dan Gitlin and the sound supervisor Nick Bergh, come up with loads of images of the baby rockers at work and at play. As time skips forward, the future rock gods fall ever-deeper in love with music as they begin strumming, banging, singing and posing. Page and Jones become session musicians and back up Shirley Bassey on “Goldfinger.” Jones starts arranging, too, including for the film “To Sir, With Love,” and makes his father proud. Plant finds his voice amid an astonishment of hairstyles. Page joins Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds and, from the ashes of that group, founds Led Zeppelin.
The band and its longtime manager, Peter Grant (a relative of MacMahon’s), didn’t love the press; from the new interviews, it seems that an early Rolling Stone pan of their first album (“unworthy material”) still stings. Even so, the filmmakers had plenty to draw from, and among their smartest moves is to let some of the songs play out in full or close to it. Among the highlights is the group’s public debut in 1968 at a Danish school; they were already moving and grooving as one. (Footage from this concert can be found online, but everything looks and sounds better here.) As the four start playing “How Many More Times,” they visibly warm up the audience and make good on their pledge to give all they’ve “got to give.”
The documentary’s abbreviated timeline means that much has been omitted, and it’s hard not to wonder if more screen chronicles will follow. That’s especially the case given that the remaining members, Page most of all, seem to have entered the retrospective phase of their legendary run with remastered box sets and a 400-page book (“Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin”) that was published in 2018, a half-century after the band formed and 38 years after it broke up following Bonham’s death. “It’s beginning to appear that there will simply never be a time when this band isn’t famous,” Chuck Klosterman wrote in 2014 in an interview with Page. A decade later, Led Zeppelin clearly has a whole lotta love still to go around.
The post ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Review: The Master Blasters appeared first on New York Times.
