Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts in Shine A Light Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

"[The Stones'] music was an inspiration," Scorsese has acknowledged. "They have a very powerful force to their music and the sound that they create... they were key in creating images in my imagination, feelings and impressions that found their way into a lot of my movies — it became the signature of Mean Streets, for example, the use of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash.'" He has further reflected: "Their songs always come off extremely well in movies — there is a drive and authority to their music and also and edge to it. I've used 'Gimme Shelter' twice now in my pictures. [Actually, three times. But who's counting? — Ed] The idea of realizing that we are on our own and that we need shelter somewhere that I might not get from you — I'm going to have to find my own — it's a desperation reflecting a point in the '60s but it is also contemporary, which is why I put it in The Departed, a reflection of where we are today. That film depicts a moral ground zero — you don't know where anybody stands, nobody seems to be telling the truth and what the hell is truth, anyway? 'Gimme Shelter' was the only thing that seemed to work."

The affinity between the Stones' music and Scorsese's films run deep. Both deal unflinchingly with the darker sides of our culture — abusive sexuality, addiction, violence and domination, and both seek out the aspects of the sacred that seem hopelessly intertwined in the profane. Both too are innovators — the Stones helping shape the sound of a generation, Scorsese and his cohort of young filmmakers rescuing Hollywood from itself in the same era, as detailed in Peter Biskind's book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood." Yet both the band and the director have always been deeply reverent for what had come before — Scorsese gorging himself throughout his childhood on classic films in New York's seedy repertory movie palaces, the Stones steeping themselves in the low down sounds of blues and R&B masters like Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.

Rolling Stones founding member Brian Jones in rehearsal Photo © Ethan Russell. Click here to read PopPhoto's exclusive interview with Russell about his work photographing the Stones on their 1968 tour.

Forty years after "Beggars Banquet" hit the charts, Shine A Light, beyond its rock and roll thrills, offers a chance to reflect on the fate of the '68 generation. The bits of archival footage in the film in which Jagger is ambushed in a BBC interviews by sanctimonious clergymen, teachers, reporters and politicians taking him to task for his recent drug arrest and his part in the anarchic youth scene are revelatory. Was rock and roll ever really that dangerous? The defenders of the public order seemed to think so. They would probably be shocked to see Mick and Keith, all these years later, hobnobbing amiably in the film's intro with President Clinton and his mother-in-law (the concerts in the movie were birthday benefit shows for Clinton's charitable foundation). Another archival clip shows a reporter asking a young Jagger, "Can you picture yourself doing this when you're 60?" Without missing a beat, Jagger, with his beatific full-lipped pout, answers "Easily, yeah." Other clips show reporters posing endless variations of the same question. In this weekend's press conference one reporter repeated it, asking if they could see themselves doing it at 70. Jagger hesitated "I don't know — " and Charlie Watts wryly interrupted: "It's only five years away!"

The potent, masterful performances in Shine A Light are a testament to the truth of the band's promise in the Buddy Holly cover track that opens their debut album to "Not Fade Away." Why then, if the band can still deliver the goods, has the question of when the Stones are going to stop rocking dogged them for decades? At first, judging from the clips seen in the film, the question seemed a product of the establishment's need to dismiss the rebellious youth culture as juvenile — something they would all grow out of. But by now it seems to have morphed into the product of the Baby Boom generation's own anxieties about mortality: to see our youth idols up on stage with their faces so deeply marked by time is to come to grips with the reality of our own aging. So this is why the Stones seem to be endlessly pestered by this question, a question that was never directed so obsessively at the aging bluesmen whose records the Stones built their sound on, the question about when they are going to step out of the limelight as real people, performers, and into the cultural slipstream of recordings and memory, where they, like the Beatles, MLK, RFK, and their audience are forever young.

The cultural and political ruptures of 1968, and the suppressed energies that they released, energies that the Blues had always tapped, fed the creative vision of both Scorsese and the Stones. These radical upheavals would be incorporated into the system, their icons used in commercials for Microsoft and American Express. But their power still seethes somewhere beneath the surface ready to be reborn — and Shine A Light captures this power, conjured one more time by the "Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World."