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Rockwell Matters

May 19, 2008
 
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My initial conceit here was to go to two movies about old folk singing and playing rock & roll music: “Young@Heart” and “Shine a Light.” The latter is a concert film by Martin Scorsese about a Rolling Stones concert at the Beacon Theater in New York. The former follows a group of 70-, 80- and, in a couple of cases, 90- somethings singing mostly punk rock songs. The conceit was to compare the adorable if maybe manipulated oldsters with men nearly their age who also play punkish rock, albeit on a rather grander scale of “wealth and fame,” as Mick Jagger introduces himself in “Sympathy for the Devil.”
 
Actually attending these two films on consecutive days did yield the predictable reactions. “Young@Heart,” which was directed by Stephen Walker, really is pretty adorable. The soloists sing remarkably well, even those who die in the course of the shooting, and their backup musicians, some old and some merely middle-aged, crank out the instrumentals with verve.
 
The chorus’s director, Bob Cilman, who looks dapperly diabolical in the best “Sympathy for the Devil” mode, draws remarkable work from his charges and clearly has done great things for their lives. Cilman picks his songs on the same basis that Linda Ronstadt picked hers for her album “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Take a title that has relevant implications, to babies for her and geezers for him, and play on the incongruity. Ronstadt chose songs like “You Will Rock Me” and turned them into lullabies; Cilman takes “I Feel Good” or “Yes We Can Can” and turns them into triumph-of-the-human-spirit affirmations. It sounds icky; on screen, it really does fall somewhere between touching and inspirational.
 
At this late date the Rolling Stones are neither touching nor inspirational. But my initial conceit, which was to portray them as geezers not much younger or more relevant to today than the most senior of senior citizens, didn’t quite pan out. Scorsese hasn’t made any cinematic breakthroughs here: this is a straightforward rock concert film. And the Stones don’t do anything different from what they’ve been doing for decades. I saw them way back when, and covered their 1975 U.S. tour when I was the New York Times rock critic. Their image still carried with it a whiff of danger now long since sanitized by their mere survival. Keith Richards plays Johnny Depp’s dad and poses for Louis Vuitton ads, and Jagger is an astonishingly energetic, boyish-leathery cultural icon far removed from the diabolical.
 
And yet, and yet: their music is still terrific, they play and sing with a professional flair that true oldies bands might well envy, and their larger-than-life presences – I deliberately saw the IMAX version – retain enormous character, even charm. Here, every wrinkle really does tell a story, and in their own way, the Stones are as inspirational a survival saga as the self-deprecating amateur oldsters in Young@Heart. Rock is a very big tent these days, and welcomes most everyone under its canvas.
 
— John Rockwell
 
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