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.

Variety reviews a new documentary on Patti Smith:

The titular rocker-poet gets a suitable portrait in Steven Sebring’s “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” which runs radically against the grain of American-made pop music docs. The result of 11 years of filming (much of it in wonderfully grainy black-and-white 16mm), pic is designed as a stream-of-consciousness experience, following Smith as she revives her music career and considers every aspect of her life. Death, too, plays a stark role, and the textured, thoughtful results may prove too cerebral and abstract for auds beyond Smith’s hardcore followers, but long-term, this will be a loss-leader that gains much respect.

This doesn’t sound promising to me.* Smith’s an amazing figure, but she hasn’t released much interesting material since at least “Gone Again,” though the critical corps is loathe to tell you that. I’m sure she’s still interesting to see in concert, but of course that can be said of a lot of nostalgia acts.

* When I hear the words “wonderfully grainy” I reach for my revolver. Jim Jarmusch’s “Year of the Horse” Neil Young concert doc begins with the flashing words “8MM! 8MM! This movie was filmed in 8MM!” (Or words to that effect.) The audience at the premiere I saw cheered them. But then at the end of the movie there were oceans of credits about all the awesome sound equipment Jarmusch and Co. used. Why is it cool to film the thing crummily but not record it that way?

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.