"Shine A Light"

Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones movie Shine a Light is the best concert I've ever been to. It was only playing at one place here in DC, so I biked up to the Uptown on the 3400 block of Connecticut Avenue -- way outside my usual range -- for an 8:00 show on Wednesday night. The Uptown is a one-screen movie palace in upper Northwest that's been continuously operating since 1936. It's more than a little frayed around the edges, but the threadbare Art-Deco opulence only heightens the sense of stepping out of time and reality as you enter. Ensconced in my seat, fifteen rows back from the largest screen in town, I was ready to be carried off by this movie. And boy was I ever.

Shine a Light is a concert movie of the Rolling Stones at New York's Beacon Theater in 2006. The first ten minutes of the movie show grainy hand-held footage of both the Stones and Scorsese preparing for the show, and the contrast gets some laughs. Scorsese, playing the caricature that is himself, is about as un-rock-and-roll as they come in his minute and obsessive preparation. The band, in the meantime, are touring and generally having a good time, not showing the least amount of interest in the high-stress logistical machinations going on around them. By the time the lights go down and the audience surges in anticipation, the feeling is that the whole thing could go off the rails at any moment.

But it doesn't. Far from it: it's sheer joy to watch. First there is the unbelievable energy of the band, in particular Mick Jagger, who nearly never stands still, literally running around the stage, dancing, hopping, shimmying, shouting, and exhorting the crowd to do the same. The deep lines on his face tell his age, but in spite of them he looks for all the world like a willowy, androgynous 18 year-old. Rock and roll must be the elixir of life. Or so this movie allows us believe. Scorsese's cameras are everywhere at all times, capturing every nuance of what's happening on the stage: the small shared glances, the unguarded expressions, the shows of affection between the band-members, and in a rock-god moment backlit by the klieg lights, Keith Richards expelling a cigarette from his mouth in a bright corona of ash and spittle. The cameras swoop around the stage, creep in front of it, impinge on its boundaries, and find dynamic, engaging shots that make every other concert movie I've ever seen look like home movies shot from a tripod at the back of a school auditorium. These cameras are alive and they rove around the stage the way we wish we could.

Another refreshing difference from standard fare concert movies is the lack of slavish close-ups of guitar players' fingers during signature hot licks. As one kind of music fan, I can appreciate those shots: they allow us to revel in our rock star's virtuosity as players. But most of the people in the audience at a Rolling Stones show aren't there to get a firsthand look at Ronnie Wood's technique: they're there to be transported by the alchemy that occurs when you stir together charisma, sweat, righteousness, and deep bass beats. Scorsese and his fleet of hot-rod cinematographers get this, and give us the mythic characters, not the geeky details.

Shine a Light is about the Rolling Stones, and it's about rock and roll, but it's also about the movies. The show is framed on either end by the "making-of" meta-narrative. And throughout the footage of the concert, the cameras constantly find one another, so that among the thronging audience is the bright eye of a camera lens, spectating, helping to ignite the alchemy. But movies have alchemical properties of their own: the close-up on-stage nuances Scorsese captures -- the half-smiles, the grimaces, the pause to light a cigarette -- those shots become iconic on a forty-foot tall screen. In turning his cameras on themselves, Scorsese ends up making a movie about not one but two of the great cultural myth-makers of our times: rock and roll and moving pictures. And by hitching the movie-making story to a high-energy rock show, Scorses can also borrow some of rock and roll's performativity, literally performing his feat of movie-making for us on the stage of the Beacon Theater. The two genres bleed into one another and augment one another's powers, and it's magical to watch.