Chris Vognar

The Rolling Stones are a perpetual-motion machine onstage, led by zigzagging 64-year-old ageless wonder Mick Jagger. He moves fast – almost as fast as Martin Scorsese talks.

Mr. Scorsese's enthusiasm, for filmmaking and for the Stones, bubbles forth like a geyser, the words barely keeping up with the thoughts. Marty and Mick: a speed match made in heaven and captured in the dynamic new concert movie Shine a Light.

Mr. Scorsese has been going to the Stones well ever since Robert De Niro entered that bar in Mean Streets to the opening chords of "Jumpin' Jack Flash." When Shine a Light premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, Mr. Jagger joked that it's the first Scorsese film that doesn't include "Gimme Shelter." And he's almost right.

But with Light, Mr. Scorsese doesn't just use their music; he throws multiple moving cameras into an intimate concert at New York's Beacon Theatre staged just for the movie. Of course, the band has been playing in the filmmaker's head ever since – oh, let him tell it.

On your marks. Get set:

"I became very aware of them one day in a car driving on the Long Island Expressway with a fellow student from NYU," Mr. Scorsese says in a phone interview from New York. "Suddenly this guitar riff comes in. It's 'Satisfaction.' I remember the sound of it on that mono radio on the highway. The voice sounded familiar, and the sound of the group sounded familiar. I placed it with the earlier pieces I had heard. It was a very strong effect hearing it at that moment."

For the past seven years, Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Jagger have been working on a narrative film about the music business; a final script is due in the next few months. During the course of their meetings, the singer invited the filmmaker to see a few Stones shows, where Mr. Scorsese had an experience to which many Stones concertgoers can relate:

"When I got to see them onstage, it was usually in big arenas, so I never really saw them onstage. They were very small, tiny figures."

But he could still see what was in his own head. An obsessive storyboard artist, Mr. Scorsese began piecing together shots on the spot. "I imagined my own movie to the sound of their music," he says. "The narrative of each song and the persona that they created generated images and a filmic attitude in a way – camera moves, editing, scenes. I fantasized them to the music, which eventually winds up in most of my pictures."

Talking to Mr. Scorsese is a little like visiting the world's friendliest cultural encyclopedia. He makes cross-references as Jason Kidd makes passes – you never see them coming.

For instance, the beginning of Shine a Light shows the filmmaker frantically scrambling to work out the mechanics of the film. Highly entertaining. What was the thinking behind that?

"Remember Edgar Kennedy in those old movies of Laurel and Hardy, where he'd be the foil and he'd get that slow burn?" he asks. "It's almost like being the foil in a slapstick comedy. It's like the patron in the restaurant in that Chaplin movie who gets the soup poured on him. He's just as important as Chaplin in the shot. They have to get the right foil. It's like the straight man in Abbott and Costello. Abbott was very important to Costello in terms of the wordplay and the timing."

And there you have it. The connection between the Rolling Stones and classic comedy.

Shine a Light is hardly Mr. Scorsese's first rock 'n' roll rodeo. In 1978 he directed The Last Waltz, a grand going away for the Band featuring Neil Young, Van Morrison and many others. In 2005 we got No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, much less of a concert film than a masterful study of the Dylan persona.

Shine a Light is more like The Last Waltz, a concert tailored to film, right down to the multiple cameras zooming in and gliding side-to-side on a carefully designed axis. The list of camera operators reads like a cinematography honor roll, including Ellen Kuras, Emmanuel Lubezki and this year's Oscar winner, Robert Elswit. The lead cinematographer is two-time Oscar winner Robert Richardson.

It wouldn't be a Scorsese film without superb camera movement. "Ideally you can turn the sound off and just watch the images cut together, like a dance or a piece of moving sculpture," Mr. Scorsese says.

Make that a piece of very fast-moving sculpture. With gyrating hips.