SHINE A LIGHT
Rating: *** (out of ****)
Cast: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Charlie Watts, Christina Aguilera, Jack White, Buddy Guy, Bill Clinton, Martin Scorsese
Director: Martin Scorsese
Now playing in moderate wide release and in Imax.

The experience of seeing Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light proved to be an instructive one, as it led me to the realization that I’m less of a Stones fan than I thought I was. Oh, sure, I like hearing “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Gimme Shelter” as much as anybody, but while watching Shine a Light, I began to wonder why the world is supposedly divided into “Stones fans” and “Beatles fans” – it’s hardly a contest. The Stones are hardly in the same league as the more innovative, experimental Beatles. Shine a Light, which captures the Stones at a September 2006 benefit concert for the Clinton Foundation in New York’s Beacon Theatre, runs 122 minutes. After about an hour, I was ready to go home.

Okay, so we have established that I am only a fair-weather Rolling Stones fan. This does not detract from Martin Scorsese’s achievements with Shine a Light, which are considerable: complaining that a Rolling Stones movie has too much of the Stones would be a pretty moronic position to take. If you’re in the market for a Rolling Stones concert film, Scorsese’s movie is everything you could want.

The film opens with a few minutes of black and white documentary footage about the events surrounding the concert and the film, including footage of Scorsese fretting about the playlist (the band more or less makes it up as they go along) and Bill Clinton introducing the Stones (“One of my birthday presents this year is being able to open for the Rolling Stones,” he says). Then comes the concert, which takes of the lion’s share of the film, and which is comprised of over fifteen of the band’s greatest hits. Interspersed between the songs is archival footage from the band’s nearly fifty-year history. One particularly interesting interview is of an impossibly young Mick Jagger on the band’s third anniversary, marveling that they’ve achieved such success. When asked how long they’ll stay together, he optimistically predicts, “Oh, I think we’re pretty well set for at least another year.”

Shine of Light is a technical masterpiece. Scorsese has assembled a team of ten cinematographers, all of them Oscar nominees or winners, who capture the event with startling immediacy and intensity. Energetic songs like “Jumping Jack Flash” are filmed with frantic zooms and quick cuts, becoming an impressionistic blur of light and sound. Calmer songs like “As Tears Go By” are shot more sedately but no less expertly. There are also three guest stars (Jack White, Christina Aguilera and Buddy Guy), and whenever one of them shares a microphone with Mick Jagger, the camera zooms in so impossibly close that you can see the spit and the sweat with crystal clarity on the Imax screen.

This is one of the only concert films I can think of to have truly memorable imagery. The opening documentary scenes are seen as a small square in the middle of the screen, but when the concert footage begins, it expands to occupy the entire Imax screen, an effect that brings about the same sense of wonder that I suspect audiences must have felt in the 1950s when the movie narrator exclaimed, “This is Cinerama!” Another high point comes when “Sympathy for the Devil” begins and Jagger emerges from the back door of the theatre as a red silhouette against a blinding white background.

After a while, it became sensory overload for me. I left the theatre with my ears ringing and a slight headache. But if you like the Stones, you’ll be in heaven. Shine a Light is the next best thing to seeing them live.