Minneapolis' puny but way-cool new indie film space, the Trylon Microcinema, screened the new White Stripes documentary/concert film "Under Great White Northern Lights" last night, part of a regular series with the Sound Unseen festival. The event was a smash hit on several fronts. Sound Unseen got to show the movie a week before its official U.S. premiere next week at the South by Southwest Film Conference. The Trylon got some deserved exposure among local hipsters. And the movie was perfectly complemented with a performance by the local music scene's most deadly rock duo, Gay Witch Abortion, in the adjacent XYZ art gallery. It was almost as perfect as when Anvil performed after "Anvil!: The

Story of Anvil" at the Uptown Theater last year. And louder, too.

At the center of it all was a pretty mesmerizing rock doc. "Under Great White Northern Lights" was filmed during the Stripes' brilliantly conceived and playfully executed 2007 tour to every providence in Canada. Predictably, there's a lot of awesome performance footage in the film, including everything from an acoustic tune on a couch for local Inuit elders to a fully electrified set in a pool hall to plenty of straight-up concert clips. I can't wait to get the accompanying soundtrack/live album from the movie (out March 16 along with the DVD, all packaged in various forms).

There's a lot more to the movie than that, though. For starters, I learned a surprising amount about Canadian geography and culture from the film (seriously). The big surprise, though, was how intimate the movie gets behind-the-scenes. We see a lot of off-stage interplay between Jack and Meg, who (not surprisingly) appear to have one mighty strange relationship. Without giving away too much, the movie subtly but clearly foreshadows Meg's purported nervous breakdown or whatever emotional wreckage caused the duo to cancel dates on the pending tour and go on hiatus. For more reasons than the black-and-white footage, then, it strongly resembles the grand-poobah of rock docs, Dylan's "Don't Look Back."