Watching Captain America: Brave New World earlier this month was a strange experience. I’d spend the last few months of watching excellent challenging new features (like The Seed of the Sacred Fig and All We Imagine as Light) and classic pre-1990 cinema. After growing accustomed to the visual standards of these movies, Brave New World's weird blocking and lighting looked extra disorienting. It was like I’d existed in a wonderful room temperature for eons and then tossed into the Sahara Desert.
Unexpectedly, a similar experience gripped me as the new documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin began. 2024’s final months delivered a deluge of exquisite documentaries like Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etats, No Other Land, Dahomey and Black Box Diaries. Heck, one of 2025’s first standout titles was Grand Theft Hamlet. All these features had such distinctive visual aesthetics that pushed the boundaries of what documentaries could look and sound like. After all that, in saunters Becoming Led Zeppelin with a very bog-standard “talking heads” format.
That doesn’t mean this Bernard MacMahon directorial effort is bad. However, it’s conventionality is especially apparent when compared to other recent documentaries, not to mention the trailblazing music it’s chronicling.
Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Robert Plan. These four British men were once strangers. They all lived vastly different lives yet each hoped to put bread on the table through the music scene. A chance 1968 meeting between the quartet, though, led to the creation of Led Zeppelin. This was a band fused from all four of their distinctive musical interests. Psychedelia, Little Richard, the most unhinged drumming you’ve ever heard, it was all thrown into a musical stew that took the world by storm in 1970.
MacMahon focuses exclusively on fresh interviews with Zeppelin’s three surviving members (Page, Plant, and Jones). He's also secured a rare opportunity to utilize audio from one of the few interviews Bonham ever granted in his short life. This inherently means Becoming Led Zeppelin is a limited documentary in scope. The only stories or perspectives on the band’s pop culture impact are the ones these two feel comfortable sharing publicly. Everything's excessively polished considering Led Zeppelin's famously chaotic, unpredictable music. However, the central subjects still share some amusing anecdotes, especially in Led Zeppelin’s earliest sequences.
Stories about the band pre-fame are some of the film’s unquestionable highlights. Plant especially has a warm air to him as a narrator. He’s the one that draws you in the most with his verbiage. Part of that comes from his openness about how especially vulnerable he was setting off on a music career (he was often homeless and scraping by to get meals). Jones just seems very chill and subdued about anything. Page's earliest story involving working in the same room as Shirley Bassey performing Goldfinger's theme. Plant’s yarns, meanwhile, reverberate with lived-in reality.
Any moment where the trio are reacting to footage of themselves performing decades earlier also captured my imagination and attention. It’s like a lesser (though still interesting) version of that Summer of Soul sequence where 5th Dimension performers revisit footage of them belting out "Let the Sunshine In" at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. In both cases, magnetic on-stage figures get to become spectators for the first time. Now planted in the audience's eyes, they witness their work from a whole new angle. Witnessing the visibly moved facial expressions of Page, Plant, and Jones watching themselves from 50+ years ago fascinatingly encapsulates cinema's prowess as a time machine.
Unfortunately, these richly human Becoming Led Zeppelin digressions vanish in the unholy din of this documentaries second-half. Once these musicians begin recounting their touring days in 1970, the anecdotes and visuals on-screen become tediously repetitive. The words audiences hear are just flat recounting of them waltzing away from one city to the next. Minimal drama or distinctive insights occurs. MacMahon accompanies these stories with uninterrupted replays of Zeppelin tunes told with stabs at trippy psychedelia. Since Becoming Led Zeppelin firmly doesn’t want to alienate the mainstream, though, these images rarely get more surreal than similar visuals in Recess: School’s Out. In other words, there’s no mind-bending eye candy to compensate for the monotonous interview segments.
Complimenting these forgettable forays into psychedelia are the Page, Plant, and Jones interviews. MacMahon and cinematographer Vern Moen realize the talking head segments with the surviving three Zeppelin members in such a flat, unremarkable manner. Watching Becoming Led Zeppelin, my mind inevitably wandered to Don Hahn's Howard. Specifically, I recalled Hahn prioritizing visuals by letting all interviews play out as narration. I also hungered for Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’s relentlessly energetic and inventive displays of archival and freshly recorded testimony. Meanwhile,Becoming Led Zeppelin’s only real innovative interview portion flourish is when Page briefly talks outside instead of inside a studio. Wind slightly intruding in on his audio in these scenes is a welcome yet all too fleeting burst of natural imperfection.
Too polished and surface-level for its own good, Becoming Led Zeppelin’s inevitably drags mightily. On paper, that sounds incomprehensible when covering a band with lively propulsive of tunes like “Whole Lotta Love" and "Good Times Bad Times". Sadly, these musicians are trapped in the standard music documentary woodchipper. Even Becoming Led Zeppelin’s ending lacks much fanfare or energy. The feature just fizzles out on a standard fade to black after one last wistful anecdote. While Led Zeppelin’s tunes broke so much new ground, Becoming Led Zeppelin sometimes made me want to nod off!
There’s no question it’s enjoyable hearing some of the greatest rock songs in history through movie theater speakers. For those who partook Becoming Led Zeppelin in IMAX, I’m sure these ditties were especially rollicking. However, familiar pre-existing tunes can’t carry any movie, even ones from legends like Led Zeppelin. Only occasionally does Becoming Led Zeppelin strike something profound or deliver memorable imagery. Even if 2024’s final months hadn’t given me several superior documentaries to compare it to, Becoming Led Zeppelin would still be a frustratingly underwhelming exercise.