‘He’s like a method actor’: the Japanese salesman who transforms into Jimmy Page

One could be forgiven for assuming that a documentary about Akio Sakurai would be a portrait of rock and roll cosplay at its most campy and madcap. Instead, Peter Michael Dowd’s film is a moving tribute to the purity and meticulousness of its subject’s quixotic quest.

Dowd, who lives in Los Angeles, learned about Sakurai on YouTube, where videos of the Japanese megafan’s reenactments of Jimmy Page concerts proliferated. “I saw this clip and it just said: Rain Song, 1979 version. I clicked on it, and I said, wait a minute, there’s a Japanese guy who looks exactly like Jimmy Page, but more importantly, he’s wearing the blue button down shirt, the white linen pants, the black loafers of Jimmy Page’s exact outfit from August 4, 1979,” Dowd said.

It also shows its subject working with a costume designers to nail the exact crease in a jacket that Page wore onstage, or conspiring with vintage equipment specialists to capture the exact reverb of a particular recording. “I can only use guitars he played,” Sakurai says in the film. “If it was a different guitar, I wouldn’t understand the song.” His mastery of the Led Zeppelin catalogue is no less painstaking.

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