The finished film presents the Stones in high energy and bottled up on the stage of the vintage neo-Grecian theater. There's also some odd off-stage material--the completely artificial booking was presented as a fundraiser and it was attended by the Clintons who greeted the band before the music played; as the band sniggers, the political family is presented as the square backstage admirers, the role Kevin Costner played in that old Madonna documentary. Scorsese appears on camera a lot, too, fretting and cajoling the band to give him a set list.

Jagger said afterward that the crowd was "not a good one, they were nice people, but not the kind of audience that is going to stir up the band." His guitarist said the cheering and dancing in aisles was unimportant. "The show was a good one," the 64-year-old Richards said, "but you have to know that it's not just about the band, right? It's about Martin Scorsese . . . it's a rock show painted by a Rembrandt."

It was a portrait that took some time, mostly because of the schedules of the principals. The show was staged in fall 2006. No one was more involved than Jagger, who was a persistent presence in every stage of the film. During the editing, he was the one pushing to keep the finished product lean. For instance, the film is peppered with vintage snippets of interviews with the Stones from the 1960s and 1970s, and many of them are amusing and some are even heartwarming.

"It's got a light touch," Jagger said. "It's not some gloomy thing. There was a temptation to put more of those interviews in because they're funny. But during the editing, I said, 'No, cut it there. That's enough.' " One reason was to keep the momentum of the stage performance going, but Jagger said a band with so much history needs to resist anything that starts to feel like a museum piece. "People have seen a lot of that before," the singer said. Then, with an expression of mild weariness, Jagger said he still wasn't sure the Stones needed another film document. "There's quite a shelf full, already, don't you think?"

Tarnish on their track record

There's always been a whiff of danger to the Stones, of course, and it comes through in their history on camera. Most infamously, the 1970 film "Gimme Shelter" by the Maysles brothers documented the nightmarish scene the previous year at Altamont Speedway, where the Hells Angels were hired as security but went on a rampage. One 18-year-old concert-goer was stabbed and stomped to death.