Martin Scorsese is no stranger to great music. The soundtracks to his films are plastered with fabulously pitch-perfect selections, and his respective roles as producer and director on oft lauded televised documentaries about the blues, as well as rock legends like Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan, signify a clear appreciation and understanding of the form.

Strictly speaking, it’s difficult to qualify his new release, “Shine a Light,” as a documentary. For one thing, it’s not made immediately clear exactly what’s being documented. The first reel mostly documents the process of documenting the process, and while providing the only brief glimpses the film offers of the Stones offstage (aside from a handful of oddly disjointed vintage interviews), it features an awful lot more footage of ol’ Marty himself, finding ways to make a simple concert shoot remarkably complicated.

Sixteen cameras of various utility—handheld, steadicams, on dollies and one on an enormous brontosaur of a crane—are positioned in and around New York’s relatively intimate 2,800-seat Beacon Theater. Jagger’s apparent (if brief) concern about the film’s intrusion on the live audience’s experience is summarily brushed aside over the phone by Scorsese. This exchange, as well as a prolonged schtick involving Jaggers’ withholding of the final set list from the filmmaker until the absolute last minute before show time seem suspiciously staged, setting an uncomfortably inauthentic tone to the rest of the film once the lights and music finally fire up.

Throughout the dozen or so tunes played, we never once return backstage. We never see any of Jagger’s countless wardrobe changes. The first two rows of the audience is cast with a gaggle of suspiciously attractive young ladies, and in the few shots of the audience, these would appear to be the only listeners acting as if their having any kind of fun. The rest of the crowd seems content enough to sit quietly in their seats with their hands in their laps.

These apparent contrivances are compounded, among other things, by an obtrusive sound design in which individual phone cameras occasionally click louder than the pounding of the drums. So much of the film seems intentionally post-engineered that it becomes near impossible to lose oneself to the actual showmanship of the musicians.

Which brings us to the musicians. Mick Jagger, who turns 65 this July, may look like a used twist of jerky, but man, he bounces and flails like a nine-year-old in an antigravity chamber. Nary an inch of stage escapes his hammering footprints as he paces and preens in front of the band. His energy rockets right past impressive and into inspirational, as he clearly invests every fiber of his boney old self into all the songs he performs. Keenly aware of every camera pointed at him, he repeatedly rushes Scorsese’s crew, and, in one priceless moment, stops dead in front of a phone camera he spies in the front row, throwing his head back in a perfect rock star, “d’ya wanna touch me” pose as it flashes. He’s an absolute whirlwind, a rock ’n’ roll hurricane, giving no ground to the ravages of time, age and even possibly senility.

Of the other band members, not so much can be said. Except for a few heartwarming moments during which we get a sense of the conversations their instruments are having as they play, they tend to lumber about in the background, looking like discarded piles of wet laundry. It may just be a symptom of having played the same tunes for nearly half a century, but they just go through the motions with a listless punchclock lassitude, occasionally flicking picks out at the audience like so many cigarette butts. Keith Richards sleepily schleps up to the mic for two solo songs, which may be one too many.

Also, for being billed as the world’s greatest rock and roll band, the Stones regularly get blown offstage by their guest performers. It’s almost like when you don’t hear your fridge running until it shuts off—they seem to be doing just fine, that is, until blues great Buddy Guy comes out, pipes up, and shows them how a real man wails it to the back of the room. The diminutive Christina Aguilera even gives Mick a vocal run for his money, though he makes it perfectly clear to her whose stage she’s on.

Perhaps the band just wants to be remembered for its music, but with all the tricks up Scorsese’s sleeve, he really hasn’t shown us anything here that we haven’t seen before. “Shine a Light” fails to effectively emulate the energy of attending a true live event. There’s no illustration, outside of simple longevity, of why these musicians have garnered such a legendary reputation. It provides no insight into how the Stones do what they do, or why the world has so universally responded to them.
Standing as a curious snapshot of a weathered, if not quite petrified, group that refuses to burn out or fade away, this work seems destined only to gather moss on the DVD shelves of established fans who don’t need to learn anything new about the Stones, but may desire a cheap souvenir to recall live shows that are becoming rarer by the year. The only thing it shines a light on, unfortunately, may be Scorsese’s unparalleled ego.