It Might Get Loud

A documentary that brings together three generations of guitarists, It Might Get Loud plays like a cool guitar solo, with a beginning, middle and ending. The spotlight shines on Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), The Edge (David Evans of U2), and Jack White (White Stripes) showing them in their home studios and then bringing them together to talk and jam at various locales.
The straight-faced approach of director David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) hones in on technique and how sounds are developed and quite successfully steers It Might Get Loud away from merely being a hagiography. Nobody would suggest that The Edge or White are the virtuosos that Page is and rightly so Guggenheim doesn’t try to make such comparisons. What he gives us are fascinating facts about the craft of rocking out on an electric axe.
We observe White making an electronic string device out of raw materials. White also had his luthier trick out his classic hollowbody and attach an extendable microphone into the guitar. We learn that Page was a teenage guitar wizard who could read music and worked as a studio musician on songs like “Goldfinger.” A trip to the country mansion where Led Zep recorded the most classic rock imaginable reveals how the sound quality of the front room’s incredibly high ceiling gave the songs depth. The Edge’s various effects devices and racks are shown up close and personal and he takes the filmmakers to the school where he and Bono formed their first band.
This is the kind of film that jump-starts your rock-n-roll batteries only with guitar strings instead of cables. It Might Be Loud opens September 4 at the Angelika.