‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Review: The Master Blasters

Soon after Sha’Carri Richardson looks right at the camera in the new Nike ad “So Win,” you hear the telltale sounds of one of the most famous guitar riffs in history. Nike dropped the commercial during the Super Bowl, a seemingly apt occasion for a celebration of women athletes. It’s a typical Nike sales pitch, even if I’m still a bit dazed and confused that this ode to female excellence is set to “Whole Lotta Love,” the Led Zeppelin song in which Robert Plant promises, among other things, that he’s “gonna give you every inch of my love.”

That particular lyric isn’t in the commercial, but you hear it and much more of Plant’s moaning, groaning and baby-please beseeching in the new documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin.” A hagiographic look at the group’s beginnings, the movie is as straightforward as it is headbangingly diverting. A smooth assemblage of new and archival material, it introduces Led Zep’s own fab four — Plant (vocals), Jimmy Page (guitar), John Paul Jones (bass, keyboard) and John Bonham (drums) — and sketches in their background, revisiting how they got into music and joined forces. After two hooky hours, it wraps up in January 1970 with a rousing concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall and Plant vowing “you will be mine.”

Origin stories tend to be inherently appealing, particularly for viewers already invested in the artist. “Becoming Led Zeppelin” works especially hard to please — including, it seems, its own subjects. The movie might not be an official authorized portrait, but it plays like one, as it skitters over the group’s early highs, steers clear of the band’s excesses and dodges anything unpleasant, scandalous or potentially illegal. The focus here is on the guys’ youthful self-invention and giddy discovery, on who they were before “Stairway to Heaven,” before the private plane called the Starship 1 and the Madison Square Garden gigs. It’s also, instructively, Zeppelin before Bonham’s accidental death in 1980 at age 32.

The movie is anchored by a newly uncovered audio interview with Bonham and by contemporary chats with Page, Plant and Jones. Notably, the three surviving members seem to have been interviewed separately, and are usually parked in similar elaborately carved wood chairs in a plush, somewhat gloomy space kitted out with candelabras and Oriental rugs. The location suggests that the royals have graciously granted you an audience, but the results are generally warm, relaxed and, every so often, a touch melancholic. The location visually connects the men, creating a kind of virtual reunion that helps unify the material as each musician strolls down memory lane amid a trove of visual and audio material.

The director Bernard MacMahon and his co-writer, Allison McGourty, have gone deep into the archives and, with help from the editor Dan Gitlin and the sound supervisor Nick Bergh, come up with loads of images of the baby rockers at work and at play. As time skips forward, the future rock gods fall ever-deeper in love with music as they begin strumming, banging, singing and posing. Page and Jones become session musicians and back up Shirley Bassey on “Goldfinger.” Jones starts arranging, too, including for the film “To Sir, With Love,” and makes his father proud. Plant finds his voice amid an astonishment of hairstyles. Page joins Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds and, from the ashes of that group, founds Led Zeppelin.