They just had to turn on the red light

Listening to rock music is, or can be, energizing. Listening to rock stars whine about their lives is, in a word, boring. Bo-ring.

I just got out of “Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out,” Stewart Copleand’s film about his years with The Police, a period that comprised the late ’70s and early ’80s. It’s hardly the first inside look at a group’s evolution from nothing to everything to nothing again, but it might be the one with the least to say.

For one thing, it depends almost exclusively on the footage that Copeland, the group’s drummer, took (or had taken) with a Super 8 camera he bought in 1978. And so it’s all blurry, overexposed and amateurish to the point that, had an ex-rock star not made it, it likely wouldn’t have the cut at a home-movie film festival.

That, though, is what the movie feels like: One long series of setting up and breaking down of the band’s instruments, of shots in the van (or limo or bus) as the trio and their increasingly growing group of roadies roam around the world, of the occasional concert, one long series of shots that has them mugging for the camera in a way that makes the Beatles in “A Hard Day’s Night” look as serious as Supreme Court justices.

There are a couple of laughs to be had – a key one being the shot of a drunk, fat guy, lying on the stage, grooving with the music and pretending to play the drums – but not enough of them. There’s also the admission by Copeland, a composer in his own right, that Sting wrote most of the band’s material.

But beyond that, Copeland’s narration never gets beyond the obvious. “Curious thing about adulation,” he says at one point. “It begins to start to feel a lot like obligation.” And he adds this, as the band tries to come up with the album “Ghost in the Machine” in 1981 in Montserrat: “We’re here in paradise, but this band is starting to get on my nerves.”

Thing is, he keeps talking about how the band is starting to grow apart, just as The Beatles did in 1969. But he never shows it. He gives us only one joke of a scene after the next. There’s no real “inside” look at the band, at its formation, at who each of the musicians is, at what the legacy – if any – the band left.

There’s just a bunch of footage that should have been passed on to someone who could have done something with it. Martin Scorsese, maybe. Or Jonathan Demme.