Shine a Light

Shine a Light is a perfectly acceptable concert film. It doesn’t add to the body of notable concert films in cinema history, like The Last Waltz or Stop Making Sense, but it’s a good time, especially if you like The Rolling Stones. I saw it in IMAX, which helps. I would imagine seeing it on a smaller screen would be a profoundly lesser buzz.

Martin Scorsese is the director, and the Rolling Stones are the band, performing a benefit concert at New York’s Beacon Theater. The beginning of the film is some backstage stuff that reminded me of Spinal Tap, such as Mick Jagger disapproving of the stage design (maybe because it didn’t have Stonehenge?) and Scorsese agreeing that burning Jagger alive would be a bad idea. When Keith Richards shows someone a portion of Charlie Watts’ drum kit I half expected him to say “it goes up to 11.” There’s a bit of comedy involving Scorsese desperately needing to know the set-list (Jagger has a list of songs in categories like “Medium known.”

Then Bill and Hillary Clinton make a cameo as they greet the Stones like old pals. Hillary’s mother is attending, and I’m sure she wondered what she got dragged into. Bill introduces the band, and says they are committed to climate change. I’m guessing that to the Stones climate change is clearing the smoke out of their dressing rooms.

Then the music starts. The cameras are fluid, the cutting is frantic–at times epileptically so, but mostly just right. I’ve read a lot of reviews that use all sorts of similes for how old the Stones look, so I won’t pile on here. Really, is it new to suggest that the Stones are a bunch of old men who are still at the top of a young man’s game (at least as a touring band–they haven’t had a significant album in over twenty-five years). Jagger’s face is lined, sure, but his body is trim, and he still commands the stage with his trademark strut like no other. Richards, death warmed over, can still play the guitar while listing, his head slightly cocked, the notes feeding from brain to fingers as if accessing a higher power, at times a cigarette dangling from his lips. It’s all magic.

The Stones have so many songs that it’s impossible that you will hear everything you want but equally impossible that you won’t hear at least half-dozen of your favorites. They open with Jumping Jack Flash, and then mix in newer stuff that no one cares about with the golden oldies. I especially liked As Tears Go By and the tongue-in-cheek country song Faraway Eyes. Richards does a nice job with You’ve Got the Silver, and Sympathy For the Devil raises the roof. They close, of course, with Satisfaction. There are three guests: Jack White of The White Stripes, Christina Aguilera, and bluesman Buddy Guy, who joins them for a Muddy Waters song, Champagne and Reefer. I’m sure Bill Clinton liked that one.

Interspersed throughout the songs are a retrospective of clips from interviews they’ve done throughout the years, from the early days when Mick says he wonders whether they will be doing this for another year, to a 1972 interview with Dick Cavett. When Cavett wonders whether Mick can see himself doing this at sixty (he was then not yet thirty) Jaggers says absolutely, and he was right–he’s now almost sixty-five, and still shaking it.