Review: Mr. Jimmy

Whole lotta love.

Mr. Jimmy is a movie about star worship edging over into madness. Not that the Mr. Jimmy of the title—a Japanese guitarist and onetime kimono salesman named Akio Sakurai—sees it that way. Ever since he first heard Led Zeppelin as a teenager, and then laid eyes on the band in The Song Remains the Same, the group's 1976 concert documentary, Sakurai has had one mission in life: to demonstrate his adoration of Zeppelin founder Jimmy Page. He is completely candid about this: "I want to be Jimmy Page," he remembers thinking.

He is of course doomed to failure in this aspiration, having none of Page's creative gifts or formidable cool. Sakurai—let's call him Jimmy, everyone else does—is aware of his inadequacies. But he believes he's found a way to surmount them—through obsessive imitation. He has heard and studied every Zeppelin bootleg. (We see a CD of one called Listen To This Eddie, which was recorded at a 1977 Zeppelin gig by a guy with a microphone installed in his wheelchair.) Jimmy studies these shows obsessively, so that when he takes the stage with his band (called Mr. Jimmy, of course) at one of the little Tokyo rock clubs in which he's performed for the last 30 years, they are able to replicate every musical detail of every vintage performance. One night they might focus on a specific 1973 date at New York's Madison Square Garden; on another, they might revisit a particular show on the European tour that preceded that concert.

What is the point of this mimicry? "It's very Japanese," says a technician at the shop that provides Jimmy with period-perfect versions of old-school capacitors and pickups for his vintage equipment. "Jimmy plays to recreate. We manufacture to recreate."

Same with the guitars. Jimmy has a prime Harmony acoustic of the kind that Page is known to have used. ("He wrote some of his greatest songs with this guitar.")  He even owns a latter-day model of Page's famous double-neck Gibson. "I can only use guitars he played," Jimmy says. "If it was a different guitar, I wouldn't understand the song, and the guitar wouldn't show me the way."

He is equally devoted to the particulars of Page's Zeppelin-era stage outfits—the iconic silk-and-velvet "Dragon Suit," for instance, the one with the rampant golden lizard making its way down one leg. Page started wearing the trousers of this outfit around March 1975, Sakurai says; the jacket completed the ensemble in April: "He wore it at all five shows at Earl's Court."

So what does all of this emulation add up to? We see Mr. Jimmy onstage, and the band is slick and tight, with Sakurai offering a flashy simulacrum of the Page guitar sound. But we've heard it all before, every bent note and squalling distortion, so the music is empty of excitement. The show is a carefully crafted fake. But maybe that's enough. Sumito Okamoto, the band's manager, a onetime employee of Tokyo Disneyland, has some thoughts on this. "At Disneyland," he says, "everything is fake. But people enter that fake world and have fun."

Things get real one night in 2012, when Mr. Jimmy is playing yet another packed Tokyo club. Suddenly, out of nowhere, an unexpected visitor walks in the door—it's Jimmy Page himself, in town for some promotional purpose. Page has apparently heard about Mr. Jimmy. We see him sitting down at a table, taking in the show, and at the end rising to join the crowd in a standing ovation. "I could see his eyes," Sakurai says, virtually melting with happiness. "It was an almost dreamlike evening."

Inspired, and encouraged by his wife, Junko, Jimmy decides to finally quit the small-time Tokyo bar scene and relocate to Los Angeles, where Led Zeppelin once played the much-storied Whisky A Go Go. Peter Michael Dowd, the movie's director and editor, made a smart choice in following Sakurai's story beyond the meeting with Page, which might have concluded any other film. Instead, Dowd tracks him to America, where he encounters other Zeppelin obsessives (although none quite as obsessed as he is). Most of these people are in "tribute" bands with names like Led Zepagain, something in which Jimmy has zero interest. Dowd sticks with him on his search for the secrets of Jimmy Page, and soon we see that this could be a road with no end.

"I can never do the same as him," Sakurai says of his idol. "Every time I study a song, I feel like he gets farther out of reach."