The three surviving members tell the story of their first two years, and the concert footage, left to run whole, is the reason to go. It is an authorised account and it behaves like one: nothing said here would trouble a lawyer.
Bernard MacMahon’s film, written with his producer Allison McGourty, is the first account of Led Zeppelin made with the band’s blessing, and it knows exactly how much of the story it wants to tell. It starts with four boys and their record collections and stops at the end of 1969, with two albums out and America won. Nothing after that is mentioned. What we get instead is 122 minutes of three old men remembering how it felt to be young and loud, and a great deal of footage of them being exactly that. The footage is the reason to go.
Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant are interviewed separately, and Vern Moen shoots them close and plainly lit, with nothing behind them to pull the eye from the faces. Page talks about sound the way a joiner talks about wood: which room, which amplifier, why the drums were put where they were. Jones is dry, and a little amused at having been the session man who arranged other people’s hits. Plant is the storyteller, happy to laugh at the boy he was. John Bonham, who died in 1980, is present through an interview recorded decades ago and not heard in public until now, and the film lets the other three sit and listen to it. It moved us more than we expected. Nobody says anything clever; they listen to a friend’s voice, and Plant’s face does the rest.
The music is handled with more respect than most rock documentaries can afford. Dan Gitlin cuts the performances so that they run whole, or near enough, rather than as a montage under somebody’s reminiscence. A show at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Denmark in 1969, the band playing to a room of teenagers who do not yet know what to do with it, is left to run until the song ends, and we sat forward for the whole of it. ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ gets the same treatment. The sound is loud and clean, and in a cinema it is the closest most of us will get to the thing itself.
MacMahon has a weakness for illustrating everything. The first stretch, four childhoods told in turn, is padded with newsreel and period footage that stands in for whatever is being talked about, and it is a long time before the four men are in the same room. When they get there, in London in 1968, the film picks up and stays up.
What it will not do is let anyone else speak. There are no journalists, no engineers, no rival musicians, and there is nobody to say a word against Peter Grant, the manager, who appears in archive and is remembered only with gratitude. Jeff Beck turns up in old footage as Page’s friend and contemporary and that is the nearest thing to an outside voice. The band’s reputation for wreckage, on and off stage, is never raised, and the decision to stop in 1969 leaves out the ten years most people would ask about. We did not feel cheated, exactly; we felt managed.
Length is the other cost of leaving the songs whole. We admired the decision and, by the ninth or tenth full performance, we were still checking how much of the two hours was left. A film about a band this loud should not make us feel we have sat politely through a slideshow, and for stretches of the last half hour it does.
Don’t Look Back (1967) and Gimme Shelter (1970) had cameras present while things were going wrong. This one arrives more than fifty years later, with the survivors choosing what to remember. It is still a good evening for anyone who owns the records, and a fair one for anyone who does not, provided they see it somewhere with proper speakers. Do not expect to learn anything the band did not want you to know.
