Thirteen guys named Motown

This will go down in history as the year of the documentary. Etre et Avoir, Sophie Fiennes's Hoover Street Revival, Trembling Before G-D and Michael Winterbottom's In This World were all stunning works that added something new to the form.

Now comes Paul Justman's film about the men behind Motown's greatest hits, which leaps on to the screen with an energy that redefines the music documentary.

Standing in the Shadows of Motown is constructed around a set of concerts held in six days in December 2000 at Detroit's Royal Oak Music Theatre that brought together the surviving musicians of the Motown house band, The Funk Brothers. Archive footage, concert appearances, recording sessions, interviews old and new and dramatic reconstructions are welded together in a variety of film styles - from digital video to multi-camera 35mm filming - to tell the story.

And what a story. This is not just another saga of a bunch of forgotten musos. It rewrites musical history by contextualising the music, the scene in which it flourished and the musicians themselves to reveal the impact they had on the Motown sound - and on the social and political climate of the time.

The Funk Brothers were drawn together by Motown supremo Berry Gordy, who hand-picked them from the jazz and blues clubs of Detroit.

Their artistic life at the Motown hit factory lasted from the Sixties to the mid-Seventies and their recordings - backing Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and The Temptations - became the soundtracks to such historic moments as the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War.

Musically, they were the hidden link between soul and the funk-andpsychedelia of Bootsy Collins and Jimi Hendrix, and a profound influence on The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Justman's film is pitched somewhere between Wim Wenders's Buena Vista Social Club and Martin Scorsese's record of The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, and the central concert performance alone is worth the admission price.

Younger singers perform the great Motown songs backed by the surviving Funk Brothers. Each song sounds as fresh and innovative as the day one first clapped ears on it - the highest compliment I can pay to singers Joan Osborne, Ben Harper and Chaka Khan is that they are all equal to the task.

Considering that The Funk Brothers comprised 13 musicians, Justman does wonders in keeping the screen time balanced between them. Clearly, some come to the fore: James Jamerson, considered the finest bass player in the world, who used one-fingered upright bass techniques on the new electric Fender Precision; Eddie "Bongo" Brown, who created spontaneous interlocking rhythms on the bongos though he couldn't read a note of music (one of the Brothers recalls seeing a nudie magazine on the stand in place of the sheet music); and guitarist Joe Messina, who had played for Charlie Parker and Miles Davis but hadn't picked up a guitar for 30 years before the Royal Oak concerts.