It Might Get Loud
Coolidge Cor­ner The­atre
8 Sep­tem­ber 2009

The premise: Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White come together to dis­cuss gui­tars, their sig­na­ture sounds, song­writ­ing, and the cre­ative process. Will it pro­vide deep tech­ni­cal insight into the gui­tar mas­tery of these leg­ends or will it, as White glibly pre­dicts, sim­ply end in a fist­fight? Nei­ther, as Davis Guggenheim’s newest doc­u­men­tary turns out, but the film is a truly enjoy­able, some­times edu­ca­tional, and sat­is­fy­ingly tune­ful jour­ney nonetheless.

The three char­ac­ters are fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple. Page and White, in par­tic­u­lar, impress with the sur­pris­ing depth and breadth of their musi­cal tastes. Watch­ing their eyes as they lis­ten to their favorite songs is telling. White earns bonus points in the Scot­tos­phere for using equip­ment that looks like it came entirely from Michi­gan yard sales. Page earns smiles from the whole the­atre when he breaks out into air gui­tar in his liv­ing room. There is a lovely coun­ter­point between the artists’ musi­cal styles: new and stock footage of Page’s fancy Zep­pelin fin­ger­work is cap­ti­vat­ing. But then a smil­ing Edge demon­strates how sim­ple his leg­endary gui­tar riffs are by switch­ing out his mas­sive effects sys­tem, reveal­ing just a hand­ful of repeated notes. Jack White denounces over-reliance on tech­nol­ogy by con­struct­ing and play­ing a one-string elec­tric gui­tar out of trash, wire, nails and ham­mer. Then the three learn from each other and jam together.

The mediocre dig­i­tal pro­jec­tion at The Coolidge drove me crazy for the first few min­utes, but (unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally) the movie soon drew me in to the point where I for­got about it. Guggen­heim capa­bly weaves loca­tion shots, inter­views, archival footage, con­cert films, and dozens of toe-tapping songs into the story of the meet­ing. This movie is imper­fect, but watch­ing and lis­ten­ing to these guys is hyp­notic. See it!