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Three Necks Are Better Than One? | Jack White, Jimmy Page, and The Edge jam uneasily in It Might Get Loud.

IT MIGHT GET LOUD
Directed by Davis Guggenheim. Starring The Edge, Jimmy Page, Jack White. Opens Fri, Nov 27.
**1/2

After a credit sequence full of loving, almost erotic close-ups of electric guitars, the following text appears onscreen: “On January 23, 2008, three musicians came together to discuss the electric guitar.”

These first minutes of Davis Guggenheim’s documentary It Might Get Loud also show those same musicians — Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, The Edge of U2, and Jack White of The White Stripes — en route to a specially prepared performance space. Apparently the decade-defining guitarists have never met, and each muses about what will happen when they first set eyes on the others. White, the young turk of the group, deadpans, “I don’t know — a fistfight?”

Of course, it turns out to be nothing of the sort. While these men each come from a radically different background (culturally and musically, even within the broad genre of rock), It Might Get Loud is carefully orchestrated to be nothing but an ultra-pleasant brainstorming session, where the electric guitar is front and centre, to be praised and gushed over in various ways.

Though even that doesn’t quite pan out. Maybe it’s because the face-to-face session didn’t go as swimmingly as Guggenheim hoped, but the bulk of the film turns out to be straitlaced biography, with each man narrating the story of his career to date. Most of this material will be old news to even casual fans of these groups, though there is a nicely revealing sequence in which the guitarists recall the songs that made them want to pick up the instrument in the first place. For Page, it was Link Wray’s “Rumble”; for Edge, The Jam’s raucous appearance on Top of the Pops; and for White, hearing Son House’s eerily sparse “Grinnin’ in Your Face” as an 18-year-old.

Funnily enough, it’s in showing exactly what kind of music these guitarists responded to, and exactly what status quos they rejected, that the film’s fatal flaw is revealed: these guys don’t seem to like one another all that much. And aside from their shared status as iconic players, they don’t really have reason to. In one of his solo scenes, Edge sneers at overblown 1970s bands with 15-minute guitar solos — whoops! Didn’t see you there, Jimmy Page, master of the stoner noodle. Earlier, White decries the fancy guitar technology of the past quarter-century as nothing but a lazy crutch — ahem! Pardon me, Edge, proud owner of at least 20 effect pedals. Rock ’n’ roll, after all, is built on rebellion, and these guys are essentially brought face to face with the very people they’ve spent their careers railing against. Awkward.

The guys themselves are an interesting bunch. As has been said, we don’t see them doing much in the way of interaction during the piecemeal roundtable clips, but there are two jam sessions near the end that probably speak louder than words ever could. During run-throughs of Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying” and, to close things out, The Band’s “The Weight,” each player’s personality shines through loud and clear in how they treat their guitar. Page, the elder statesman, sticks to elegant, classical scales, while White immediately jumps into a white-hot slide solo at the top of the neck. (Edge, the middle sibling here, just looks uncomfortable, clearly wishing he had a few hours’ prep time to fiddle with his pedals.)

In the end, these various guitar parts don’t add up to a particularly compelling song, nor do the stories of their players to a film. The fact that such a meeting took place is itself noteworthy, but without some meatier talking points to back it up, the whole thing is only mildly interesting — less a footnote to rock history than a footnote inside
another footnote.