Venice Film Festival 2021: Bernard MacMahon’s documentary includes rare interviews with the surviving members of the band
In one of the key scenes from Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film “Almost Famous,” an aspiring rock star played by Billy Crudup stands on a rooftop in Tokepa, Kansas, throws out his arms and shouts, “I am a golden god!” As an expression of stoned rock-star hubris, it’s perfect – but it’s also based on a real rock star, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, who apparently made that proclamation from the top of the Continental Hyatt House in Los Angeles sometime back in the late 1960s or early ’70s. Plant’s exclamation pretty much sums up Led Zeppelin, the subjects of Bernard MacMahon’s “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” which premiered on Saturday at the Venice Film Festival. They were true rock gods from a time when the music of the ’60s was splintering, fragmenting and in need of a new breed of gods – and they knew it, gloried in it and made light of it, all at the same time. From the start, they were designed to be bigger and louder and bolder than everybody else, but also to wrap their bravado in mystique. Their contract allowed them to make their music without interference from the record company; they considered themselves an album band and refused to make singles; and they rarely talked to the press, which for the most part didn’t like them nearly as much as the fans did. They let few people behind the curtain – not in their prime and rarely since they disbanded after the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980. That’s why “Becoming Led Zeppelin” is something of an event, even in a year chock full of music documentaries. MacMahon and writer-producer Allison McGourty persuaded the three surviving members of the band – singer Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones – to give their blessings to the project, to open their archives and to sit for interviews, making them the only voices heard in the film. (Bonham is heard in the audio recording of an Australian interview.) In a year in which nonfiction films have included Questlove’s Sundance winner “Summer of Soul” and Edgar Wright’s “The Sparks Brothers,” “Becoming Led Zeppelin” is one of the biggest gets… and also one of the most conventional films. It offers glimpses of the band we’ve never seen before, but it also withholds a lot. And it’s entirely true to the spirit of the band, which was known for marathon concerts and never made an album without at least one song longer than six minutes. In other words, it’s potent as hell and as excessive as “Physical Graffiti,” the 1975 album whose excess was pretty much inseparable from its power. If you’re a diehard fan, you’ll probably glory in what the film delivers and wish there were more of it; if you’re not, you may find yourself power-chorded into submission sometime before the 2-hour and 17-minute running time comes to an end. Diehard fans, though, are the clear target audience for “Becoming Led Zeppelin” – which, unlike most music docs, feels no need to establish in its opening moments why its subject is important.
