To save you time, I'll make some broad generalizations up front. Further down I'll get more into the guts of this film, but if you're just trying to decide if this movie is worth 2hrs of your life, here's what you need to know:
If you're a hardcore Stones fan, then this film will possibly irritate you, maybe even to the point of rioting as Stones fans reportedly did at the premiere of this film in '68. This is not a documentary about the Stones nor is it a documentary at all. It's a film that Godard had been intending to make about counter-culture revolution, and it just happened to coincide with Godard filming the Stones recording "Sympathy for the Devil", so he mashed them together and this is the result.
If you're a Godard fan, you might appreciate what he tried to accomplish here, but all the same, I've never met a Godard fan who considers this among his better efforts.
With a visionary filmmaker like Godard and a very poetic & provocative song like "Sympathy for the Devil", you'd think the marriage of the two would spawn a work of art the likes of which hadn't been seen since Pink Floyd's "The Wall". (Yeah I know The Wall came out in 1982 but bear with me, I'm onna roll).
Instead I feel like the two themes didn't exactly gel. Godard took a markedly different approach which, on its own, could have been a worthy film. Rather than follow the Stones' lead with an intriguing historical narrative that leads us from Biblical times to the assassination of JFK, Godard just throws a bunch of unrelated vignettes full of superfluous political blather (intended to be tiresome) interspersed with Stones recording the song, and we are to accept that they are somehow related?
While both the song & the film make heavy use of irony & sarcasm, and while both the song & the film are about the decline of human society due to human nature ("the devil"), the Stones & Godard are on different ends of the spectrum. What makes the Stones song so memorable is its suave, seductive flair told in 1st person narrative. In the very first line, Mick introduces the devil (the speaker) as "a man of wealth and taste". Essentially, this presents a very revolutionary concept of the devil: not an, ugly, smelly, cartoonish creature with a pitchfork but a charming, hypnotizing, classy character.
It would have been great if the film had followed along this absolutely central theme, but instead it took a very base, unattractive approach that was not enticing at all. There are no classy gents playing the devil here, instead we get the Black Panthers in a squalid junkyard spouting NOT hypnotic words but pulpy rhetoric which we immediately dismiss as pointless ravings as they casually commit base murder before our eyes.
In another example, Godard sets up a comical slapstick scene in a comic book store that also sells porn & Nazi propaganda, where the customers are allowed to take what they want in exchange for a "heil Hitler" and a slap across the face of two kidnapped hippies. I thought that was a hilarious scene, but really it was jarringly incongruous with the Stones song.
Between the half dozen vignettes like the Black Panther scene & the comic book scene & scenes of someone spray painting graffiti slogans across London, we get abruptly shifted back to the studio sessions where the Stones are working out the details of their song. In contrast with the vignettes, the studio scenes are very somber, very respectful and very endearing to watch. I found myself wishing that someone actually *would* make a documentary about the "Sympathy" sessions because so much could have been expounded on. We see the slow evolution of the initial song (a gospel type ballad) to what it ultimately became, an ironically uptempo samba that draws its power from a seductive Afro-Brazilian candomblé beat. Again I'm harping on the seductiveness of the song, both lyrically and instrumentally, because it's a real shame that Godard either didn't pick up on that, or chose to go in the opposite direction with a (deliberately) unappealing visual show.
Like I said, Godard's film would have been worthy on its own. The Stones song is, of course, a great piece of literature in its own right. But sticking them both together like this just didn't stick. I'm glad I saw this film, and I'll probably watch it again. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they're ready for a very strange and jarring experience.
For a great marriage of movie & music, I would recommend the aforementioned "Pink Floyd The Wall" as well as "Tommy", a sarcastic, carnival-esque satire much like Godard's approach here but with the perfect music in the same vein, and maybe the Monkees movie "Head" which is a nearly-incomprehensible acid trip but with similarly nearly-incomprehensible lyrics that gel perfectly.
