The algebra of celebrity is a curious thing. Both Martin Scorsese and the Rolling Stones are aging pop-culture icons more than willing to sacrifice a long-standing aesthetic principle or two for a little latter-day ego gratification. You’d think that a pairing of two artists past their prime would seem doubly pathetic. Instead, as both parties know, the algebra increases the attention exponentially.

And that, Dear Reader, is why Martin Scorsese has directed a concert film of the Rolling Stones. The occasion was a pair of special shows for Bill Clinton at the Beacon Theater in New York in August 2006; “Shine a Light” is a record of the second of these, with all but a song or two of the original show included in the film.

The movie opens today and will also come out in an Imax version.

For a film that turns out to be much less than half the disaster it could have been, an extended beginning section–purporting to capture all of the zany difficulties Scorsese had getting the film ready—is far worse than it had to be.

One of the things we’re supposed to believe is that Scorsese didn’t know what song the Stones were going to start the show with, and that he was handed the set list seconds before the show started—we’re even given shots of one of his assistants dashing up the stairs to give it to him. (Scorsese has already admitted in interviews that this wasn’t the case.) And since the Stones had started virtually all of their last sixty or seventy shows with “Jumping Jack Flash,” the whole question of what their set opener was going to be comes across as a little manufactured.

Scorsese’s ego is unattractive; besides ginning up the false drama about his tough life as a big-deal movie director, he injects himself needlessly at the end as well. It’s all about Marty!

There are a few other suspicious touches in the first section as well, by which I mean I think Scorsese was faking things in a film that purports to be a documentary. One is a conveniently expository voice-over that goes something like: “Boy, I hear Bill Clinton is here because the show is a special benefit for his foundation!” And most folks will marvel that, for one of the hottest rock shows in New York in many a year, a phalanx of busty and enthusiastic young chicas managed to score all the best positions right in front of the stage.

Anyway, once the show starts, it’s actually not entirely awful. As far as the Stones go, I have been a card-carrying playa hata for many years. The band stopped recording worthwhile albums abruptly in 1978, and their shows (I’ve seen six or eight of the stadium affairs, but I stopped in the late 1990s) have become coarse, unsubtle, overpriced messes. All that said, there are pleasures in “Shine a Light.”

The sight of the band so up close and personal is really not novel; most of the folks who’ve had the pleasure of being in the same stadium as the band since they moved to mega-touring in 1981 have seen the same footage on the jumbotrons. But caught on real film, and cut slightly less frenetically and, it must be said, with a great deal more artistry, by a guy like Scorsese, there is a kick.

The band, which had been playing virtually nonstop for more than a year at that point, was its usual tight self and the song selection is pretty interesting. Jagger, who tends to slur words in large venues, takes the time to enunciate clearly. The sound of the film is exemplary; it’s terrific in a regular multiplex, not overheavy on the bass, with all the instruments articulating clearly. And in the Imax version, there’s of course an added dimension; besides the sheer size and scope of the effect on the big screen it’s worth the price of admission just to marvel at the extravagant sound separation, which lets you hear perfectly the restraint and compatibility of the way Keith Richards and Ron Wood play together.

And most of all is the sense Scorsese gives us of being right there. Just as with The Last Waltz, some thirty years ago, he is an expert at crafting the magnificent tableau, the deep focus shot that captures two three four profiles in a row. He also satisfies our voyeuristic impulses by letting shots linger on the effects of time. While Richards does look … damaged, he isn’t haggard or doddering; Jagger, showing his years, is nonetheless a physical wonder. And we also get the severe undershots in which, as the Variety reviewer mentioned some months ago, you really can literally see the dental work on the back of Mick Jagger’s’ front teeth. Yum.

There’s a gorgeous mid-movie interlude in which Richards sings one of his “Keith songs,” “You’ve Got the Silver,” standing without his guitar, with Ronnie Wood playing backup behind him. Draped in a frock coat, his disgrace of a hairstyle falling out of a tangled doo-rag, he looks like a deranged transvestite grandmother. And the film’s most poignant moment comes at the close of the last song, “Satisfaction,” as Richards ends up on the floor for extended moments, physically leaning on his guitar, visibly panting. (He is, after all, 64.)

The early rockers aren’t convincing; who really wants to see Jagger scampering around a small stage yelping “Jumping Jack Flash” or “Shattered” at stadium intensity anyway? But several other early songs are surprises; “As Tears Go By,” the pretty ballad the pair wrote for Marianne Faithful many years ago, particularly, is sung straight, with Jagger, incredibly, standing still in front of a microphone and singing the thing with feeling. Even a minor song like “She Was Hot” gets turned into a rave up. And “Some Girls,” which has a special place in the Stones canon, would, save for one calamitous artistic decision on Jagger’s part, have been the high point of the film for its spacious rethinking and the dizzying guitar interplay.

(“Some Girls,” from 1978, is unassailably the band’s last inimitable song; it’s an odd amalgam of quite funny references to Bob Dylan’s divorce and a travelogue of women around the world. [”French girls they want Cartier; Italian girls want cars” etc. etc.] But the song’s notorious lyric “Black girls just wanna get fucked all night/I just don’t have that much jam” was dropped from the movie. “Fuck them if they can’t take a joke” was Jagger’s response when folks like Jesse Jackson protested it on its release in 1978. Times have apparently changed. Both the Stones and Scorsese traffic to this day in their artistic integrity; why bowdlerize a classic? If they were worried about the Clintons’ delicate sensibilities, they could have not sung it.)

There are three special guests; Jack White, who sings “Lovin’ Cup,” from Exile; Buddy Guy, who sings the blues chestnut “Champagne and Reefer”; and Christina Aguilera, who sings “Live With Me,” which has the distinction of being by a country mile the least interesting song on the band’s best album, Let It Bleed. White’s cherubic countenance contrasts well with Jagger’s ragged features; Guy has an adamantine visage and a mischievous humor; when he first begins to sing his voice, a blare of an instrument, reminds us of the power of the music that birthed the Stones. Aguilera’s appearance is a glimpse of how sad the Stones can be. A marginal song and a duet with an evanescent pop star was bad enough; Jagger makes things worse by engaging in a little dirty dancing with her. Since he is old enough to be her grandfather, and looks it, the effect is somewhat less than sexy.

Anyway, just like most Stones shows, everything falls apart at the end, as the group hauls out first Aguilera and then the warhorses: “Sympathy, “Start Me Up,” “Brown Sugar,” “Satisfaction,” etc. etc. The central problem of the film, you realize, is that it is not a filmed record of the Stones playing a small theater. It’s a concert movie filmed on a set that happens to be a small theater. So there’s no real intimacy with the audience; “As Tears Go By” aside, Jagger’s not singing songs, he’s bellowing anthems; he’s not making the room his own, he’s just doing his stadium shtick for the cameras. Jagger starts out with the frenetic “Jumping Jack Flash” and ends, as if on a matter of principle, at an even more animated pace. He’s really just making a case—the case that he has any business at all fronting a rock band at his age. Fortunately for him, I’m not on that jury.

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Hitsville on the Stone’s 1994 tour:

At Soldier Field, on the second part of a two-night stand, the Stones played an inoffensive set that lacked the vulgar predictability of their Steel Wheels outing and the enervation and shtick of the 1981 Tattoo You tour. Like most bands that try to play stadiums (U2 is the only exception I can think of offhand), they had no business being there, lacking both the musical muscle and conceptual vision to pull it off, but for a Very Late Period Rolling Stones show, it was almost not bad.

Hitsville on the Stones’ 1997 tour:

When Keith Richards gets aroused, he gets a wild, distant look in his eye, his voice cracks, and his left leg rises slightly, the way a cat’s hindquarters do when you stroke its butt.