Gimme Shelter

A documentary crew tails the Rolling Stones for a leg of their 1969 North American tour and unwittingly captures one of the nastiest, bloodiest all-day concerts in music history: the infamous Altamont Speedway show. Mostly pieced together from ambient handheld shots taken on the day of the festival and screened without narration, it's a stunning stream-of-consciousness presentation of the crowds, cultures and events leading up to the angry, violent personality of the gig itself.

It's stunning just how little foresight and planning went into this event. Two days before, organizers were still trying to settle on a venue with little or no mind paid to such vital elements as parking, waste management or security. Maybe that kind of mindset would have worked for a small or mid-sized show, but with a crowd in excess of 300,000 showing up to take in what was being portrayed as “The Woodstock of the West," the only possible outcome of such an awful strategy is total, unmitigated chaos. And that's what they get, as a pushy, balls-tripping audience runs headlong into a moody, fight-spoiling security outfit and lights a tragic set of fireworks. A painfully slow degradation of civility and humanity set to music, it's a dark counterpoint to the radiant, optimistic attitudes seen at Woodstock.

Like Woodstock before it, this film succeeds in large part because the quality of the footage is so good. Here, it's not so much the musical performances as it is the absolute chaos that permeated the concert grounds, to say nothing of course of the murder at the end. (I'm not the world's biggest Stones fan, but it's undeniable the stage presence that Jagger has.) I do think the movie has limitations as a documentary, especially given my understanding that it was commissioned as a shorter film by the Stones themselves. I with the movie had focused less on the preliminary MSG concert and more on Altamont itself, and also wish it had spent a LOT more time explaining how this shitshow came to be--we get a few odd phone calls with the lawyer but little else. I'm left wondering how involved Stones management was in the bad decisions that followed.