One of the liveliest and most entertaining documentaries of the year, "Shut Up and Sing" takes a topical event -- the Dixie Chicks' dissing of President Bush at a London concert, prompting many country radio stations to ban their tunes -- and gives it a fresh and insightful airing. Like a few other great music documentaries, like Scorsese's "The Last Waltz" or "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster," the film transcends music (and even politics) to become a sizzling portrait of artists accidentally at a crossroads.

Veteran documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple (who directed this film with Cecilia Peck, Gregory Peck's daughter) had extraordinary access to the immediate aftermath of the off-the-cuff comment heard 'round the world. She delivers a first-class documentary that has all the drama and catharsis of a feature.

When Chicks frontwoman Natalie Maines told a London audience in 2003 as the United States prepared to attack Iraq that she was ashamed Bush was from her home state of Texas, the crowd cheered. Yet the reaction stateside was swift and angry. Right away, the band is told by its managers and press people that there's fallout. And through all the fretting by their handlers about image and public reaction, the bandmates remain solid and cool. It's a pleasure to see a successful band undaunted by negative public reaction and the accompanying jitters from the sponsors and the suits.

As Maines takes the brunt of the organized hate campaign by religious extremists -- there's even a death threat just before a concert -- her bandmates, sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire, show remarkable resilience, loyalty and artistic integrity. They take the issues and the consequences seriously but never themselves.

The death threat is chilling, but so are the crowds that show up at concert dates with signs denouncing the Chicks as traitors, and the country-music DJs who spew vitriol about the band on the air and refuse to play their records. It's hard to imagine now that the Chicks faced real career jeopardy over this expression of anti-war sentiment.

Kopple, who produced the 2004 documentary "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" and whose social humanism was best revealed in her acclaimed film about striking miners, "Harlan Country USA," clearly sympathizes with the Chicks' politics. But the film isn't a Michael Moore-style polemic. Instead what emerges, thanks to Kopple's skill and good fortune to be there, is how three performers react to the glare of a spotlight and the outside pressure to backpedal and soften their image. The band's management, for instance, objects to the now-famous Entertainment Weekly cover that featured the Chicks literally branded, but the band wanted to do it, a decision that now seems a no-brainer. The film also brilliantly depicts the extraordinary importance put on performers by our celebrity-obsessed culture. The sight of kids and parents burning Dixie Chicks CDs is shocking and makes one wonder why such outrage is never directed at politicians.

Maines' anger and hurt only galvanized her to become a better songwriter, and in preparing to go on tour away from their country base, the Dixie Chicks, in the end, got a whole new audience and recognition. Kopple's footage includes Maines rehearsing "Not Ready to Make Nice," the defiant response to criticism and censorship that would become a hit single. On tour to promote their first non-country CD, "Taking the Long Way," the documentary's onstage moments are infectious and masterfully filmed (Kopple's other credits include "Wild Man Blues," for which she went on the road with Woody Allen as he played clarinet with Dixieland bands.) When the Chicks play London again one year after the incident and Maines takes the stage -- well, let's just say this chick has balls. "Shut Up and Sing" is a near-perfect blending of gravitas and levity and, in the end, a terrific show-biz tale.

-- by Loren King