"Becoming Led Zeppelin", ripe for sound

Halfway through the film, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page recounts their first American tour in 1968. On the first date in Denver, Colorado, the band found themselves playing in a half-empty airplane hangar. “I was taken aback, ” he recalls. “ So I said, ‘ Let’s get together.’ Like we’re playing a small club. Let’s not worry about whether there’s people there or not. Let’s play for ourselves and see what happens.”

Allison McGourty and Bernard MacMahon's documentary works in a similar way: it takes the most superlativo-amphigoric group of all time, symbol of all the excesses and illusions of rock, repository of the equation "screams of a defenestrated Castafiore" + "a thousand megatons of molten metal", and relieves it of all its mythological vapors to concentrate on the essential: the sound. In the trash the hagiographic and willingly revisionist narrative that is generally the bane of music documentaries ("I knew right away that we had something unique", "I immediately understood that it was the end of the group", "they are geniuses, yes"). In the foreground, the sonic amplitude and audacity, the witchcraft that linked these four guys with personalities that were much too strong, with a thirst that was much too insatiable to be able to cohabit with anyone and allowed them to build cathedrals with great jets of magma.

We may know everything, have seen everything,