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Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood backstage

Martin Scorsese -- who has staged many a memorable film sequence to the raw, driving power of the Rolling Stones' music from the days of Mean Streets on up to The Departed -- continues the high-class adulation with his new career-spanning Stones documentary, Shine a Light. Shot in the large-screen IMAX format before and during two charity performances at New York's intimate Beacon Theater during the group's 2006 "A Bigger Bang" tour, the flick captures guest star performances by Buddy Guy, Jack White of the White Stripes and Christina Aguilera, but also intercuts old-time '60s and '70s footage of the Stones with contemporary backstage footage and features some half-hearted head-butting between Scorsese and Mick Jagger wrangling over production details, the set and the logistics of capturing the concert on film. You might think that Scorsese, maker of superb documentaries, might pull out some of his most dazzling camera moves and other snazzy techniques to match how electrifying the Stones -- even 40 years after their debut -- can be onstage. But, Scorsese and his great cinematographer Robert Richardson keep things straightforward, clean and direct for just about the whole two hours.

Christina Aguilera and Mick Jagger performing onstage at the Beacon Theater

The director seems to respect that the real fireworks are served up by the charismatically hyperkinetic and hypersexual Jagger and by the snaky, out-there Keith Richards and, boy, do both deliver. Jagger, 63 when the film was shot, leaps, prowls, growls and commands the stage from the start, and Richards, every second of his hard living on display, is at his most enjoyably inscrutable and musically tight. If they're not the hellacious young bad boys they once were, the audience still eats them up, whether they're trotting out old barnstormers like "Brown Sugar," "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Satisfaction" or revisiting their softer stuff like "As Tears Go By." Even though Shine A Light doesn't join the ranks of top-of-the-line concert flicks like Don't Look Back, Gimme Shelter, Sympathy For the Devil and Scorsese's own The Last Waltz, it's still a blast.

by Stephen Rebello

Photos: top: ©2008 by Brigitte Lacombe; bottom: Kevin Mazur/©2008 by WPC Piecemeal, Inc. All Rights Reserved.