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White, Page and Edge: three guitarists and the truth

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Jimmy Page has the impish smile of a kid on Christmas morning. It lights up his whole face - his entire surroundings, really.

Watching him, you find yourself smiling simply because he's smiling, and it happens twice during the hypnotic and remarkable new documentary It Might Get Loud, which focuses with laser-beam intensity on the talents of guitarists The Edge, Jack White and, of course, Page himself.

The first time this occurs is in Page's house when he puts on an old vinyl single of Link Wray's Rumble. Listening to the languid, gravel-and-barbed wire-like guitar chords ring out and remarking on Wray's pioneering use of vibrato, Page is transported back to his youth, and his ear-to-ear grin is infectious.

It happens again in the movie's penultimate sequence, during a raucous three-way slide guitar jam in which Page, Edge and White perform Led Zeppelin's In My Time Of Dying.

At first, the younger musicians are tentative, reverent and differential, letting the silver-maned Page assume his rightful role as elder statesman and teacher, showing them the ropes. Gradually, Edge and White grow comfortable and confident, and they start playing with authority, ultimately going toe-to-toe with Page, their trademark styles bursting forth.

Page beams. He's formed a band, a one-time-only guitar supergroup that sounds utterly unique. This sequence alone, one which captures daring-do and discovery - and more importantly, the camaraderie all guitarists share - is the heart and soul of this thrilling picture.

That rarest of rock films

Conceived by producer (and guitar fan) Thomas Tull and directed with loving attention to detail by Davis Guggenheim (Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth), It Might Get Loud is that rarest of rock pictures in that it dispenses with every cliché the genre has, until now, offered.

Drugs, groupies, arrests, hotel debauchery - in other words, the movie Motley Crue hope to make - none of it figures in this poetic and inspiring love letter to the magical hold the guitar put on this pan-generational trio of six-string greats.