Are you taking the Mick?

The sexagenarian Rolling Stones can still deliver live shows full of energy, drama and humour. Too bad Martin Scorsese's film can't do the same, writes Peter Bradshaw

The scene is New York. A crew of four rich guys are in town. They hail from Europe and speak American well enough for business, but in certain circumstances their voices revert to the old country, where, long ago, they left one of their associates floating face down dead in a swimming pool.

It sure sounds like a Martin Scorsese movie to me. The bad news is that it's a Martin Scorsese concert movie, about a perfectly good but not especially mind-blowing concert appearance in 2006 by the Rolling Stones at the Beacon Theater, New York, in front of a beaming, special-invite crowd presided over by Mr and Mrs Bill Clinton.

Anyone who's had to sit through Scorsese's solemn 1978 film The Last Waltz, documenting the final concert appearance of the Band, may feel that Scorsese checks his sense of irony, of drama, even of cinema at the door on his way into an exciting and sweaty rock venue.

Stones tracks provide the soundtrack to some of Scorsese's most powerful cinema, but he feels no obvious desire to import that sense of conflict and drama back into the music itself.

The name of the game is simply to pay homage. To be fair, there's a lot to pay homage to. The band are in incredible shape, especially Sir Mick himself, a man whose lithe 64-year-old body makes snakes everywhere suspect their hips are a bit pudgy. He swirls, he preens, he twirls, prances and undulates like an enormous capital S.

Charlie Watts may be the only band member to have sworn off the Grecian 2000, but there is something magnificent about everyone's indifference to Botox. Their faces are deeply lined and gouged with age, their necks are mottled and wattled, but they crank out their distinctive rock'n'roll, all crashing, jangling riffs, with as much energy as ever. When Christina Aguilera comes on for a guest spot, her skin is almost shockingly young and taut, like an animatronic figure.

In theory, the concert has something to do with climate change, but it never occurs to any of them to do any Bono-style sermonising, on that or any other subject. There are, moreover, no enormous back-projections of suffering people in the developing world. The Stones' internationalism begins and ends with gloating descriptions of what girls from various countries are prepared to do. Keith Richards, incidentally, appears to have official permission to smoke cigarettes on stage. Or, maybe, he never had permission and no one dared say anything.

The movie is interspersed with old newsreel material of the Stones looking heart-stoppingly young, and these clips feature a stream of interviewers - affronted and headmasterly in the early years, genial and adoring later on - all asking the same question: how long can you keep it up? The answer being: much, much longer than you, mate.

Scorsese himself appears at the very beginning, in a jokey cameo, fretting and worrying about when and if the band will deign to let him know what songs they're going to sing, and what the set is going to look like. At the very end, Keith Richards actually attempts a gallant homage to the director. As he comes off stage, someone helps him with some kind of jacket and he splutters: "Put my robe on right!" - quoting Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull - although an obvious overdub shows that at the key moment, Keith unfortunately fluffed the line.

The band give us a generous account of their greatest hits, and everyone is happy: the band, the crowd, the film's executive producers (by which I mean the band again). Everyone. It was obviously a terrific experience for those there at the time, but a faintly pointless, directionless experience on screen. The awful truth is that concert movies really can be quite dull, and well photographed though this one certainly is, you can spend 10- or 20-minute stretches wondering what you're going to have for supper and whether to stop off at Al Osra.

Whatever creative tension there was in the band has long ago resolved itself, and the guys will just continue, raucously and happily, for an awful long time yet. It's not exactly a corporate video, but in the end there is something fundamentally incurious and blank about it.

The band have got a cheery sense of humour about themselves, especially Watts, who makes no bones about how knackered he feels almost from the word go, but even this sense of humour is sort of on cruise control, a mannerism that they all learned long ago and became one of many things they don't need to think about, especially Keith, doing his sphinx-without-a-secret grin.

The final credits declared that Mick's costumes were designed by his partner L'Wren Scott, and I instantly regretted that Scorsese had not been able to give us a bit of backstage footage of L'Wren making Mick try on some gear, perhaps some Spinal Tap-style jumpers with silly designs.

I sensed that there is still a story to be told here, somewhere, a story of how these rock legends, still teeming with energy, miraculously realigned their male energies to create a perpetual motion machine of touring and rocking and cashing in. There is a story. But Martin Scorsese is not sufficiently sceptical or churlish or un-fan-like to want to tell it.