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White, Page and Edge: three guitarists and the truth

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Before their much-anticipated summit at a Los Angeles soundstage, we are introduced to each guitarist in individualized and fascinating sections that rely on both archival footage and new vignettes that shine as bright a light on them as people as it does artists.

Early days and influences

Page talks of his early days in Epsom, England, where he discovered his first guitar in a new house his family had moved into. Galvanized by the pre-rock 'n' roll sounds of Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle craze, he became, in his words, "addicted to the guitar."

The movie traces Page's years as London's go-to session guitarist and his brief tenure in The Yardbirds. This time frame is particularly compelling in that Page, with unflinching honesty, recalls his doubts about making it. Playing on pop records bored him to tears. And even in The Yardbirds, going from gig to gig in vans and cars, sleeping on top of equipment, getting sick on the road - wasn't he supposed to be doing something different with the guitar? Something special? Something that was all his own?

In 1968, he would answer that question with a certitude heard round the world.

In a newly shot portion, Page takes us to the mythic Headley Grange, the former poorhouse where Led Zeppelin recorded their iconic fourth album. Standing in the hallway of the residence, he explains that delivery men one day happened to set up John Bonham's drums in the foyer - a lucky accident, he says, because the resulting echo (he claps his hands and allows the sound to travel upwards) became a hallmark of that album and future Zeppelin records.

Sounds come alive

In sequences that are illuminating and sometimes comical, The Edge revisits his high school in Ireland, to the practice room where U2 actually formed. "We'd spend an hour or so pushing desks around and the rest of the time learning to play," he says, then remarking how terrible they sounded. (He tries to find the exact spot on the school's bulletin board where drummer Larry Mullen Jr tacked up a note looking for a band, but can't quite figure out where it was.)

But it is in Edge's private music room in Ireland, with windows offering breathtaking, panoramic views of the water, that we start to learn what makes him tick. It is the search for the sound that has no name - a maddening matter of trial and error. Working on the riff that will eventually become Get On Your Boots, he seems both amused and frustrated. "Some days, there's just nothing," he says.

Illustrating the importance that pedal effects have on his much-copied style, he plays the riff to U2's Elevation unplugged. It sounds simple and ordinary - he even admits as much. Then he pushes a few buttons and works the wah-wah, and viola! - an arena riff emerges. The music inside the technology, how machines can further a guitar's possibilities - these are the things that make The Edge get up in the morning.

The trickiest piece

While Page and Edge come off as charming and self-deprecating, Jack White is the trickiest piece of the puzzle. This is evident during the film's opening frames in which White, standing at the porch of an old farmhouse in Tennessee, builds an instrument from a block of wood, a Coke bottle and a thick strand of wire (most definitely not a guitar string), and then fires the crude device through a vintage amp, its piercing sound scaring the bejesus out of grazing cows in the distance.

"Who says you need to buy a guitar?" White says ironically.