'Becoming Led Zeppelin' climbs the stairway to 'Stairway'

Fan-friendly doc looks at rock band's fast and loud rise

If the projector bulb had burned out at the screening of “Becoming Led Zeppelin” I attended, I don’t think I would have been that upset.

Sure, there’s lots of fun things to look at in Bernard McMahon’s documentary, which weaves archival footage of one of the world’s greatest rock bands with present-day interviews with its three surviving members. Delightfully, there are even scenes where McMahon films the band members watching and marveling at some of that footage of their younger selves.

But “Becoming Led Zeppelin” is a movie that’s intended to be heard almost more than it’s meant to be seen. Hearing the opening riff of “Heartbreaker” pounding through the theater speakers, or bathing in the psychedelic freakout of “Whole Lotta Love” as the instruments swap channels back and forth, is the ultimate expression of what the documentary is trying to accomplish.

It reflects the music-forward mission of the documentary, which is clearly authorized by singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones (the only people interviewed in the film). For a band with such a sordid reputation, there’s literally one line in the entire film referencing drugs and groupies! The rest focuses in sometimes minute detail on how the four members came together and built their sound, with so many live clips that it’s a curly chest hair’s breadth away from being a concert film.

Fitting for a movie called “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” the documentary spends a lot of time charting the four band members’ trajectory (drummer John Bonham died in 1980, bringing the group to an end, but the film makes great use of a rarely-heard audio interview). The common thread was that all four were driven to play music at an early age, sometimes with the support of their parents, often not.

And all four, to varying degrees, found themselves starting the careers in places where they weren’t quite satisfied with what they were playing. Jones and Page made a nice living as session musicians for a while (they both played on the “Goldfinger” theme!), while Plant was homeless for a while, touring with a band with the unfortunate name of “Obs’ Tweedle.”

That all changed when they came together for an exploratory jam session that unlocked something in each of them. As Jones says in the film, all four members brought very different interests and influences into the room. Led Zeppelin was “the space in between them.”

From there, “Becoming Led Zeppelin” only goes as far as the band’s meteoric rise in 1969, when they released both “Led Zeppelin I” and “Led Zeppelin II” and, after several successful American tours, brought it back home to London’s Royal Albert Hall for a celebratory show that cemented their status atop rock music.

It’s a little strange that “Becoming Led Zeppelin” doesn’t go as far as “Led Zeppelin IV” and “Stairway to Heaven” – maybe a “Being Led Zeppelin” follow-up is in the works. But I somehow doubt it, as moving forward would mean entering the darker periods of the band’s career. This is meant to be a celebratory film about that first climb up the stairway. It’s for fans only, but those fans will leave the theater very happy and slightly deafened.