Let's Spend the Night Together

A concert film shot in America. The Rolling Stones tour the United States in 1981. The band has been playing for twenty years. Its members are approaching forty. The film was shot in two places. One is an indoor arena. In New Jersey; the crowd is close and the light controlled. The other is outdoors. A stadium in Arizona; daylight, an enormous crowd, and the sound spreading into the open. The narrative cuts between the two. The songs are not in order. The edit follows no set list. From there the film is a record of performance. Mick Jagger moves constantly on stage. He runs, he dances, he rides a crane. Keith Richards barely moves. Charlie Watts is at the back, fixed and expressionless. The narrative keeps setting these three behaviours side by side. There is very little backstage. A few short shots and a dressing room. There is no talk. No interviews. What the narrative is interested in is not a band but scale: its idea is that the same songs are entirely different things in an arena and in a stadium. Archive footage cuts in at one point. A recording from the sixties and the same song. The difference is plain. Hal Ashby was among the best-known American directors of the seventies. This belongs to the last period of his career. He looks at the crowd as well. People, faces, and a stadium full of them. The sound was recorded live and corrected in a studio. The lighting design is evident in the arena sections; colour and shadow are used. The running time is a little under a hundred minutes. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood appear. Who it is for: the band's listeners and anyone who likes concert films. Who it is not for: anyone looking for context; the film describes nothing and consists entirely of the stage.