But it frames those performances with pictures of Jagger in front of a film viewer, watching footage of the '69 tour, the dealings that created a free concert on Dec. 6 of that year at the isolated Altamont Speedway in Livermore, Calif., and the band's embattled appearance there before a freaked-out crowd and a violent clutch of Hells Angels. At the soul-shriveling climax, a knife flashes -- and a murder unspools on-screen. The image is so blunt and Jagger's response to it so shrouded or implacable, that the film becomes disturbing in an almost primordial way.

In the rock dishonor roll that includes the Who concert in Cincinnati in 1979 and Pearl Jam in Roskilde, Denmark, this year, no name flashes out more luridly than Altamont. At Altamont, even a star -- Jefferson Airplane lead singer Marty Balin -- was knocked out. With 850 injured, two dead in a hit-and-run, another drowned and an 18-year-old black man slain by a Hells Angel, Altamont was awful enough to have arbiters of hipness call for the kids of Woodstock Nation to be put in stocks.

The making of -- and response to -- the film of the concert, "Gimme Shelter," proved to be just as tumultuous: It drew the most dynamic rock stars, rock writers, documentary-makers and movie critics of its era into an intellectual mosh pit. The story of this movie and its discontents is a pop-cultural saga that stars Jagger and Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby; Haskell Wexler and Greil Marcus and Stanley Booth; and includes cameos from the likes of George Lucas and Walter Murch.

The way the film's three directors -- David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin -- shape the material, the movie is a tribute to the Stones as popular artists wrapped inside a cautionary tale for the counterculture. The filmmakers crystallize the jagged contradictions that gave rise to an epochal fiasco.

From the start, the atmosphere is ripe for catastrophe. The entire enterprise is all too willful. There's something perilously off about the blend of the Stones' zonked brand of superstar noblesse oblige, fabled attorney Melvin Belli's high-powered maneuvering on behalf of the group and the surrounding attempts at seat-of-the-pants, grass-roots organizing. When disaster strikes and strikes again -- first with the Angels' leaded pool cues, later with the flaunting of a gun and the slice of that knife -- it's doubly excruciating because we see it coming. Zwerin and the Maysles slow the moment of the murder down for Jagger (and for us) on an editing table. The shot is shadowy and we know we're not getting the whole story. But the harrowing context gives the deadly scene an apocalyptic stature. It's part of a colossal, mass bad trip.

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When "Gimme Shelter" was released, some of the country's most powerful reviewers disparaged it. They said it was exploitative, too small for the subject -- even, since the Stones financed part of it, a made-to-order job designed to restore the group's tarnished reputation. "The great critics of that period got so caught up in the cultural moment that they missed the movie," charges Peter Becker. He's the director of the Criterion Collection -- the company that will release "Gimme Shelter" on DVD and that, along with Janus Films and Home Vision Cinema, spearheaded the theatrical re-release. "[The New Yorker's] Pauline Kael and [the New York Times'] Vincent Canby led the charge against 'Gimme Shelter' as an opportunistic snuff film, essentially saying that the filmmakers were complicit in the murder by having photographed it and subsequently profited from its theatrical release."

The central charge was that the concert was staged specifically to be filmed -- and irresponsibly so. While conceding that the filmmakers had caught Jagger's "feral intensity" with acute "editing of the images to the music," Kael said that "the filmed death at Altamont" was part of a "cinéma vérité spectacular." She condemned the movie with rhetorical questions: "If events are created to be photographed, is the movie that records them a documentary, or does it function in a twilight zone? Is it the cinema of fact when the facts are manufactured for the cinema?"

(Kael is an old friend of mine. When I told her that her original review was still, in Albert Maysles' words, a "thorn in his side," she cheerfully remarked, "Tough shit!")

Canby panned the film, under the title "Making Murder Pay": in another New York Times piece Albert Goldman complained that the movie "really uses its brightly colored footage whitewash the Rolling Stones, who must share some of the responsibility for the disaster and who also, as it happens, are the people who hired the filmmakers."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. chided the movie in Vogue. It was, he said, "unduly protective, not just of the Stones but of the Woodstock myth of the young." And a few years later, in 1976, Marcus, by then a book columnist at Rolling Stone, wrote that "the Stones were shown as victims, as if the purpose of the film was not to deal with real events, but to absolve those who paid for the film of any responsibility for those events."

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