For most fans, pop music forms a unifying soundtrack and an emotional road map as time goes by. But in Stefan Berg and Magnus Gertten’s new film “Rolling Like a Stone,” which begins a week-long run today at Anthology Film Archives, the Rolling Stones themselves are the glue holding together a group of Swedes marching through middle-age, carrying their own personal baggage from the swinging 1960s.

“Forty years ago — Christ!” one aging rocker exclaims as he watches vintage eight-millimeter footage of his band, plus Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, assorted siblings, friends, and hangers-on as they cavort after a gig in 1965. “Not everyone has had the Rolling Stones in their living room.”

After a performance in Malmö, Sweden, during a 1965 Scandinavian tour, three of the Stones accepted an offer to crash for a few days in the family home of one of the members of their locally based opening act, the Gonks. “Keith Richards stayed in Dad’s room,” the Gonks’ former frontman, Ola, says as the young Stones’ faces flash on the screen. “Mick Jagger tried to take my room but I was in there. Brian Jones stayed in my mom’s room, which was perfect, since it had a vanity table with lots of mirrors. He was the vainest of the bunch. He washed his hair five or six times a day.”

Using the home-movie footage documenting the Stones’ Swedish sojourn as their starting point, Messrs. Berg and Gertten re-create the blue skies of the Gonks and fellow Scandanavian rockers the Namelosers in their mid-’60s heyday. It was a time before gray skies clouded of a life that for some of the band members and their friends peaked too early, too long ago.

Divorced and jobless, Nameloser Tommy pines for the days when women flocked to him and his bandmates. “Nowadays,” he sighs, “when you get home there’s no one there.” Ola still has all his fan mail. “It ought to be illegal to be so cute,” wrote one admirer. “It was kind of like a sailor’s life,” he says, “A girl in every port.” Scenester Kirsten bravely reads from a diary and revisits her innocence as she fingers a lock of hair from one of the first of several boys who would eventually break her heart.

The most poignant aftershock of the Stones’ seismic visit is the story of Mona, a luminous fashion model who caught Brian Jones’s eye in 1965. “They called me,” she says, “and told me to take a cab because Brian wouldn’t go on stage unless I was there,” she remembers now, her camera-friendly features grown leathery with time. “So of course I went.” But after several days of private record parties on the floor of Jones’s hotel room, “The sweetest guy in the world was suddenly not very nice at all.” Ignoring Jones’s offer to take her back to London with him, Mona returned to a sweetheart with whom she’d quarreled and to whom she has been married ever since. The rest of the world mourned Jones’s death in 1969 and moved on. But Mona, whom Jones continued to call until he died, carries a kind of jet-set survivor’s guilt. “If I had gone with him,” she says, “would he still be alive today?”

Despite a heavy-handed modern soundtrack that at a few key tragic moments lays on the musical pathos by the bargeload, “Rolling Like a Stone” does an estimable job of knitting together a group of lives that have frayed, and in some cases completely unraveled, since time was on their side.

Through May 24 (32 Second Ave. at 2nd Street, 212-505-5181).