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In one of the key scenes from Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film “Almost Famous,” an aspiring rock star played by Billy Crudup stands on a rooftop in Topeka, Kansas, throws out his arms and shouts, “I am a golden god!” As an expression of stoned rock-star hubris, it’s perfect – but it’s also based on a real rock star, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, who apparently made that proclamation from the top of the Continental Hyatt House in Los Angeles sometime back in the late 1960s or early ’70s.

Plant’s exclamation pretty much sums up Led Zeppelin, the subjects of Bernard MacMahon’s “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” which premiered on Saturday at the Venice Film Festival. They were true rock gods from a time when the music of the ’60s was splintering, fragmenting and in need of a new breed of gods – and they knew it, gloried in it and made light of it,...

Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first-ever band-authorized documentary about the legendary rock group, premiered at the Venice Film Festival Saturday. Soon after, the first official clip from the upcoming film was uploaded online.

The minute-long teaser features pristine archival footage of the group performing “Good Times Bad Times” alongside black-and-white stock footage of a zeppelin hovering in the sky.

Jimmy Page was on hand for the documentary’s premiere, with the guitarist also discussing the film, the Associated Press reports. Page said the band had received many offers for an authorized documentary,...

The year of the rock ’n’ pop documentary continues. So far, 2021 has brought us Edgar Wright’s “The Sparks Brothers,” Todd Haynes’ “The Velvet Underground,” and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Summer of Soul.” Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back” series is due in November. In the meantime, the Venice Film Festival has now hosted the premiere of “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” a fully authorized history of the 1970s rock gods’ early days, directed and co-written by Bernard MacMahon.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help the thesis that this is a golden age of the music documentary. While Haynes and Wright put their own stamp on the genre, MacMahon’s workmanlike film is very much the kind of primer which you might slump in front of on television. It’s efficient and affectionate, but the band’s major contribution to cinema remains the scene in “School of Rock” in which Jack Black demands,...

Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page didn’t hold back in detailing why the band has refused to participate in a single documentary until now.

Bernard MacMahon’s “Becoming Led Zeppelin” premieres at the Venice Film Festival Saturday afternoon, and tickets for all 12 press and public screenings of the film have sold out — easily making it one of the most sought-after movies at the fest. Part of the film’s appeal is its rarity, given the band has never taken part in a film apart from “The Song Remains the Same” (1976), which was more of a concert movie.

Page, the only band member to attend the Venice press conference, told reporters at a press conference that there had been requests to make a documentary in the past “but they’d been pretty miserable.”

“Yes. Miserable,” he reiterated when chuckles went up around the room, “and also to the point where they...