You can say what you will about Jack White — common complaints include the contrivance of his live shows, bizarre aesthetic and his seemingly despotic rule over bandmate (and ex-wife) Meg White — but he will hear you, and he will pack up his things and leave for Canada. Wait, what?

An eager Oklahoma City Museum of Art crowd of about 100 was treated Wednesday night to an advance screening of “Under Great White Northern Lights”, simultaneously the Detroit band’s first live album and documentary (set for release this coming Tuesday), which follows Jack and Meg through Canada in the summer of 2007, culminating in their tenth anniversary show in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Jack answers the question, “Why Canada?” early in the doc by expressing his desire to play out-of-the-way towns for their uniqueness and as a way of hand-delivering his music to people who would otherwise rarely get to hear it. To do so, they devised the oddball plan of playing to every province of our northern neighbors, including sleepy Inuit towns that packed the house each night to see the Stripes play.

Propelled by The White Stripes’ (read: Jack’s) propensity for the bizarre and manic, blistering live performances, “Under Great White Northern Lights” is a tremendous, resounding success of a rock doc. It’s got plenty of nods to live coverage previous (Led Zeppelin-esque shots of the band and road crew exiting their touring planes), playful footage of the band playing spontaneous day shows (they blast songs from a boat in Charlottetown, a bowling alley in Saskatoon, a flour mill in Arva) and does well to mix the sparse Canadian landscape with White’s well-known color scheme fixation.

Ditching vapid stage banter and gimmicky planning, the Whites cut right to business, shredding their studio work to pieces before screaming fans. Their 1998 debut single “Let’s Shake Hands” and “Black Math” from 2003’s masterpiece “Elephant” initially set the mood at crazed as Jack transforms into a human tornado, whirling around onstage to the raucous sounds of his inhuman blues-garage guitar riffing.

The film alternates between black-and-white and color filming, though the latter tends to restrict itself to the Stripes’ preferred red, white and black. Jack emerges from the shadows while Meg sings “In the Cold, Cold Night”, and disappears again, save perhaps for glints of his pale skin.

The duo visit with Inuit elders to exchange tunes (Jack schools them in southern blues and they share a traditional accordion square dance) inducing smiles and foot-taps despite the natives’ lack of English. They share “We’re Going to Be Friends” with a group of schoolchildren and “The Wheels on the Bus” on a public transit bus in Saskatchewan. Malloy tosses in some ‘aboots’, color-scheming kilts and black-and-white shots of sparse landscapes to satisfy the Canada element, which he blends nicely with footage of post-show exhaustion, wine-swigging (Jack) and cigarette binging (Meg), characteristic of any great rock documentary.

The band marches out “Seven Nation Army” for the big finish, a song so massively heavy that it casts a shadow over the entire project itself. Meg’s kick drum resounds deep through the crowd, opening up the stage for her counterpart’s heavily distorted guitar to steamroll over the audience, flattening all those who dare to stand in its path. The instrument shrieks like a wounded animal but stomps like a pack of elephants.

After a last flag-waving salute to the crowd, one final performance awaits. Jack and Meg share an offstage piano bench, where the former tenderly sings “White Moon”, inducing tears from the latter. It’s a powerful parting image that testifies to the awesome influence of the pair’s creation, even over themselves.