Director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) crafts an innovative approach to the rock documentary with It Might Get Loud. A profile, of sorts, of the electric guitar and a portrait, of sorts, of some very famous rock stars who love it, the film assembles Jack White (of the White Stripes, among others), Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin), and The Edge (of U2) to talk about their lives in music. Their marquee bandmates -- Robert Plant, Bono, Meg White -- are seen only in archival footage. Instead, the three men gather to form a jam session or impromptu supergroup -- or something -- intercut with their individual stories.

Roaming around through rock history, this is a looser, more spontaneous portrait of public figures than Guggenheim's Inconvenient Truth, which wove Al Gore's political travails around its carefully calibrated environmental message. While the guitar is ostensibly the film's focal point, we also get plenty of biographical bits on the guitarists, along with live footage from their careers. U2, for example, is glimpsed sounding an awful lot like The Cure in the early eighties on their way to dominating stadiums as middle-aged men.

White, the youngest of the three, is also the most cinematic, with his hat, jacket, and old-timey instruments -- while the others show baby photos in their solo sections, he totes around an actual child introduced as White at a younger age, and addressed as such by his older counterpart. It's difficult for the earnest elders to compete with his willful eccentricity: The Edge paces about on a beach, as if waiting to summon the other members of U2 from the ocean by conch-call. Page, meanwhile, is oddly avuncular, almost twinkly as he discusses his long history in music, including time spent in a late-fifties skiffle band.

Though the studies of their different instrumental techniques prove illuminating, It Might Get Loud is most interesting when it places these musicians into pop cycles, exploring how three massively popular acts formed from different impulses. The Edge talks about how U2 came on the rock scene when young bands were tiring of the pomp and prog of seventies rock, which they perceived as vaguely condescending to music fans. White, meanwhile, became a nearly stadium-sized draw eschewing the kind of huge gestures now favored by U2.

Unfortunately, that ebb and flow doesn't always make it to the forefront of the narrative -- no one actually mentions Zeppelin's role in the kind of late-seventies bloat that ate at a young U2, or how U2's ascension to superstardom may or may not have changed their mission, or any conflict between White's productive minimalism and the attention his every project generates from the music press. White asserts that good rock and roll comes from picking a fight with your guitar, but that idea isn't extended to the different musicians -- their interactions are polite and reverent, and while it's fun to see the three of them throw together a cover of The Band's "The Weight," it also plunks the movie squarely in the realm of an old-school VH1 special. No one here picks a fight with much of anything.

Fans of any of the three rockers will nonetheless want to watch the film, just as they'd tune in to any music channel that still bothered to include more than the most cursory music programming. They'll discover something not unlike the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: entertaining, celebratory, and slightly defanged.



Doesn't go to 11.