Mick Jagger performing on stage during the Rolling Stones 1969 U.S. tour. Photo © Ethan Russell. Click here to read PopPhoto's exclusive interview with Russell about his work photographing the Stones on their 1968 tour.

In December 1968, amidst the tumult that swept the world that year from Saigon to Memphis to Paris to Mexico City, the Rolling Stones released "Beggars Banquet," the album that put a close to their dabblings in summer-of-love psychedelia and with its opener "Sympathy for the Devil" ushered in a cycle of raw, vicious blues-rock albums. That same year, Martin Scorsese, just two years out of NYU film school, won acclaim for his first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door, which anticipated the themes of religious guilt, sexualized violence and redemption that would unfold throughout his career. Scorsese dispensed with the canned orchestral soundtrack that was Hollywood custom and infused the movie with an ebullient array of rock and pop tunes from his own record collection. He would first use the Stones' music in his 1973 breakthrough Mean Streets, because, he says, "their music dealt with aspects of the life that I was experiencing or saw and was trying to make sense of. It was tougher, had an edge, was beautiful and honest and brutal at times."

Now, with Shine a Light, Scorsese brings his own take on that brutal, honest beauty to the screen, capturing the Rolling Stones in concert with a verve and immediacy that rivals the best of the rock-doc genre. The movie was filmed over two nights in New York's Beacon Theatre, an intimate venue that allowed Scorsese to capture the nuance of the band's performance and their close rapport with the audience. The band comes charging out of the gates with the concert's opener, "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and delivers a classic show throughout. From Jagger's first spread-eagle pose at the foot of the stage, it's immediately clear that he's hardly lost a step — he works the crowd like some profane preacher, now strutting, now skipping, now poised above the audience like a viper, conjuring and grasping with his left hand. What his voice has lost in power he makes up for with sheer charisma — grunts, snarls and yelps buoyed up above the rhythm section by the backing vocals. The concert's set list includes the definitive classics but is complemented by lesser-known tunes, appearances by Christina Aguilera, Jack White and Buddy Guy, and a superb cover of the Temptations' "Just My Imagination" that gives the wistful tune a bitter, sardonic edge.

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Unlike earlier Stones films, and Scorsese's recent documentary projects No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and The Blues, here the emphasis is on the music itself, with no new interviews and only sparse accents of archival footage. Jagger has observed of earlier Stones films that "quite a lot of the auteur directors were actually doing documentaries, and this is mostly a concert movie." The archival clips that are interspersed throughout are gems that editor David Tedeschi rescued from the vaults. Scorsese says of the editing: "We worked together for almost ten months. The music came together rather quickly in the cutting, and that was very enjoyable. The hardest part was putting together the clips. I think David had over 400 hours of footage that he culled for the documentary sections — archival footage — and then he chose about 40 hours for me to see."

The clips they chose are striking, and not just for the shock of seeing Jagger in the bloom of youth; key sequences emphasize the threat that the rock counterculture posed to the established order — for those viewers too young to remember the times it will be amazing to see Jagger crucified in the media for his recent drug arrest, as though he had to account for everything that was wrong with his generation. Other clips, as if to justify the film's focus on the music itself, emphasize the dreary, repetitive irrelevance of interviewers' questions over the years.