Becoming Led Zeppelin is a 2 hour documentary with over half of it being concert footage. So basically a concert spread across multiple venues from 1968-1970 with talking heads in between. So you better be something of a Zeppelin fan to live through it.

The doc is likely a spongie, no dirt retelling of the formation and early years. It interviews the three surviving members (who will make you feel old) while showing off a lot of early performance (which will make you feel older). No one else is interviewed… though we at least get a lot of early footage of their muasical influences. Since the movie’s called “Becoming” Led Zeppelin, it never gets past 1970 and the release of Led Zeppelin II.

And, yeah, I’m more-or-less a fan of the group… though not nearly as hardcore as the audience members behind me in the theater. They’d laugh at random inside jokes as the band members talked and broke out in applause at the finale of a few early performances.

Personally, those performances were really good but I started to get a little tired of them. I’d keep glancing at my watch thinking “here’s another song… are we trying to run out the clock?” before I realized we were indeed running out the clock. We get almost nothing of their output in the 70s or any discussion of John Bonham’s death in 1980. I guess that’s for the sequel “Being Led Zeppelin” or “Once We Were Done with Led Zeppelin and Started To Live Off the Royalties”.

I also would have liked some explanation why they were so transgressive and new. When I think of Zeppelin, I think of the 1970s but seeing this old 1968-1969 footage, I wanted some discussion of how wild they must have been in and around the Summer of Love (especially when they make a point of showing some stone-faced audience members who weren’t groovin’ to their movin’).

Still, the doc is very good at what it’s trying to do… show off some great old performances and interview the surviving members. It does exactly what they set out to do and given the fans in the back of the theater, they did it well. I was entertained too.

Score: 87