Variety’s Todd McCarthy gives “Shine a Light,” the Martin Scorsese Stones concert film, a positive review:

Martin Scorsese’s energetic account of a Stones concert at Gotham’s Beacon Theater in fall 2006 takes full advantage of heavy camera coverage and top-notch sound to create an invigorating musical trip down memory lane, as well as to provoke gentle musings on the wages of aging and the passage of time.

Those who don’t buy into the aren’t-the-Stones-great? tone of almost all coverage of the band can find a lot of cringeworthy undercurrents in the review. For example:

“Shine a Light” is mostly a Mick Jagger show, as a battery of great cinematographers (under the eye of lead d.p. Robert Richardson) keeps its cameras trained on him as he cavorts around the stage and penetrates the audience courtesy of a thrust platform; drummer Charlie Watts, guitarist Ronnie Wood and especially Keith Richards warrant occasional cutaways, as do the numerous side musicians, but the star is the star.

Yeah—who’d want to watch Keith Richards play guitar, anyway? And this:

Sixty-three at the time of the concert, Jagger is not entirely impervious to the ravages of time, and the relentless closeup scrutiny could not be more revealing — not only of his taut muscle tone and evidently fat-free physique, but of his deeply lined face; some low-angle shots are so tight you can examine the dark bridgework on the back of his front teeth.

Sign me up! The review raises some questions about Scorsese’s involvement. He has obvious history in this area: He helped edit the greatest rock movie of all time (”Woodstock”), and directed arguably the second (”The Last Waltz”). But his use of rock music in his films has become a crutch (like the subtle-as-a-flying-mallet use of “Gimme Shelter” in the opening of “The Departed”), and as with his too-agreeable take on Bob Dylan in “No Direction Home” he’s sullying his reputation by lending his tony name to advertisements for the reps of fading stars. Here’s an example from the review:

The band members’ endurance gains perspective through some wonderful interspersed clips and interview footage from earlier decades. Queried as to what question he is most frequently asked, a very young Jagger replies, “How long do you think you’re going to carry on singing?” In 1972, when Dick Cavett asks the star if he could imagine doing what he does at 60, Jagger immediately replies, “Easily.” Jagger’s and Richards’ youthful drug busts are briefly covered, although any mention of Brian Jones is conveniently avoided. But for all the group’s early unsavory reputation, by far the predominant impression Jagger conveys in the archival stuff is one of overwhelming sweetness.

The more-often-quoted Jagger mot on the subject of aging, of course, was that you wouldn’t catch him dead singing “Satisfaction” when he was 45. And “youthful drug busts” aside, Keith Richards’ decades of debilitating heroin addiction essentially destroyed the band’s recording career (it’s taken them an average of five years to throw together a mediocre collection of songs since the early 1980s) and nearly its live one as well. (The Stones toured only once in a 14-year period over the 1980s and 1990s.) Isn’t that one of the most salient facts about the band’s career? How much nicer for the group that the director chooses to mention only those wacky drug busts from the 1960s.