AT last: a screen big enough to hold Mick Jagger’s lips.
Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones “documentary” (i.e. concert film) is a first: the only Scorsese film that does not feature the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Really. I think the Dalai Lama even hummed the guitar solo in “Kundun.”
Filmed at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway two years ago, “Shine a Light” finds the band robust, if slightly robotic. The movie easily beats paying $250 to experience the Bones in person; you can see everything without having to stand up, and the sound at a multiplex is far better than any arena.
Scorsese, perhaps wondering why a filmmaker of his stature is doing the work of a journeyman HBO director, begins and ends the film with footage of himself. At the start, he and Jagger each blame the other for the stage set, and the director frets over the absence of the song list for the long-planned show, which according to this movie is popped into his greedy hands just as the concert starts.
Amusing – Scorsese seems to be channeling early Woody Allen, if not Marty DiBergi – but I don’t believe a word. Mick Jagger is known to be the kind of man who has his next 150 breakfasts planned. When Bill Clinton and spouse arrive for a photo, Jagger is the one who looks like he’s got a schedule to keep.
Commanding the stage, Sir Mick is at his snakiest, a magician/toreador in a black tailcoat. Distracting us from the fjords carved into his face, his Scarlett O’Hara waist keeps popping out from beneath a too-short shirt as he heaves with wiggle and wag.
His vocabulary of movement is familiar but comforting: the chicken flap, the index finger thrust out like a proctologist’s probe. The strut, equally martial and aerobic, suggests drill and ceremony at the Richard Simmons Brigade. He holds back nothing on “She Was Hot” and a number of other songs about Hillary Clinton.
The front row has been salted with a vaguely baffled-looking candy box of blond sweeties – nice to see hot girls catching a break for once – clapping slightly out of time. One of them is unaware that the rock experience does not allow for snapping one’s fingers. Possibly all are creeped out, on some cellular level, at the possibility that they were conceived to “Start Me Up.”
Behind them, a lone-gunman type holds a sign: “Rock on Wood.” Clearly this is a plant, as there is no such thing as a Ronnie Wood fan, but who does not enjoy the deputy guitarist’s Jurassic mullet?
Jagger maintains a state of well regulated, socially acceptable anarchy, lobbing the F-word during a cover of “Just My Imagination.” But he omits the famous line in “Some Girls” about what black girls enjoy having done to them all night and the resulting diminishment of manly fluids. “Don’t you know the crime rate’s goin’ up up up up up!” he wails, during “Shattered,” and everyone cheers nostalgically for the muggers and drug dealers who once ruled right outside the Beacon’s doors.
To the left rear, as if just emerged from a morgue drawer, stands the piratey and cadaverous guitar maestro, a Connecticut resident wearing a sparkly headscarf possibly purchased at Hot Topic. Keith Richards has one signature move: the chummy way he has of resting his right forearm on someone’s shoulder, usually Wood’s.
In this film, though, resting that arm actually looks like resting. If Ronnie made a sudden movement, you fear Richards would topple forward and impale himself on his death’s head brooch. Nearby, 66-year-old drummer Charlie Watt is caught exhaling prodigiously and making a “Whew!” face. After about two songs.
Scorsese intercuts the concert scenes with some hilarious ancient interview footage – a Jagger aged about 25 speculates that the band “is pretty well set up for at least another year” and fends off a giddy Japanese chat-show hostess.
In one scene so bizarre it could have been in “Performance,” the freaky 1970 film he starred in, young Jagger steps off a helicopter into a meadow to face a discussion on youth morals with a nerd gallery of social enforcers.
Back at the concert, special guests drop by – Jack White, Christina Aguilera. The one who changes the atmosphere, though, is genuine bluesman Buddy Guy, who with one voice and one guitar manages to cast the entire band into his shadow.
Guy seems good-natured about the plundering of the swamp mojo (no black man has ever been able to monetize it the way guys from Surrey and Middlesex have), and the audience that has no idea who this Guy is responds politely. No. 191 on the list of stuff white people like: white rock bands that are just black enough.