To outsiders, love always seems like madness. In 2011, when the Stone Roses announced that they would be reforming to play some gigs – Ian Brown, John Squire, Gary "Mani" Mounfield and Alan "Reni" Wren together onstage, 15 years after their rancorous split – many, many music fans appeared to go completely insane. Grown men wept, danced, hugged, clambered into the loft to find their Reni hat, pointed both hands to the sky for the chorus of I Am the Resurrection, then wept again. The internet exploded with delight. Oasis's Liam Gallagher tweeted "not been this happy since my kids were born" and thousands agreed.

Of course, there were cynics; but they were silenced when all 150,000 tickets for the Roses' Manchester Heaton Park gigs last year were bought in 14 minutes. The band added another Heaton Park show. That too, sold out: 220,000 tickets sold in 68 minutes. And this year, when tickets went on sale for the first cinema showing of Made of Stone, the feature-length documentary about the band's reformation, they were snapped up in 60 seconds flat.

What is it about this band – these four middle-aged Mancs, these fathers in trainers and shaggy dos, with their laughter lines and sarky comments and reluctance to play the media game – that inspires such passion? It's not just their music, although their first album, The Stone Roses, seems to grow more beautiful as the years go by: wistful harmonies and stunning, seemingly effortless musical ability combining to create a timeless, still-fresh classic. It's not just their cocksure, funny attitude, though that definitely adds to their charisma.

Perhaps it's something to do with the band's fragility, that failure to deliver. Their back catalogue is minimal, their career a depressing tale of squandered talent, dodgy contracts, amateurish management, chemical excess. Other well-loved bands – the Smiths, Oasis – managed at least four albums before everything went nasty. The Stone Roses made two, with five-and-a-half years between them; and the second one broke their spirit, along with that of three producers. They never made it in America; they never achieved their potential. Is that why they're still so worshipped?

This is not a rhetorical question. I am asking it of Shane Meadows, 40, director of Made of Stone, a film almost as breathlessly anticipated as the reunion itself. He hears me out patiently, but thinks it's something else. "If you attach yourself to certain people at a certain point in your life, they never become human again, they're always gods," he says. "The Stone Roses are like that for me."

Meadows didn't expect to direct Made of Stone. When, in 2011, he got a phone call from Ian Brown, he thought Brown might be ringing about making a video for his solo single. But instead, the singer told him that the Roses were reforming.

"And my head exploded," he says. "I started hyperventilating. Not because I thought I'd be doing anything with them, but because my dreams were coming true, I could go and actually see them play live. I'd never seen the Roses play. I'd given away my Spike Island ticket as a kid and then I'd given up on it happening. And then Ian said something about 'We're doing this press conference and we wanted to document it', and I started to twig, and I said: 'Look, if you are thinking about making a film and you let anyone else do it, I will kill myself. So you're going to have to let me do it.'"

I've interviewed Shane Meadows before, about his brilliant, award-winning films and TV series (This Is England, Dead Man's Shoes, A Room for Romeo Brass), about his ability to capture emotion on camera (he ignores the gripes of the film crew, concentrates on the actors), about his mistakes (using an enormous, energetically kicking baby to play a newborn), about what he finds funny (Paddy Considine). But this interview is different. This is an interview with Shane Meadows, Stone Roses fan. We talk for over an hour, in an arts centre cafe on Nottingham's university campus and at no point do we stop discussing the Roses. It's understandable: Meadows has been immersed in Made of Stone since Brown's 2011 phone call, and his head is still there. He was tweaking the film right up until the very last moment. The press showing was in London on 8 May at 6.30pm; Meadows handed the finished tape to the projectionist at 5.50pm.

I assumed that his final cut was taking so long because the band were demanding last-minute alterations, but Meadows says no. He asked for, and got, ultimate approval: the band had very few rules, the most limiting for Meadows being that they wouldn't do any sit-down interviews. (This means that the interviews heard in the film are all archive; the Roses today just offer quips to the camera.) Other than that, their only requests were to put stuff in: "John would email me photographs, a relative would come up with some old video footage."

Meadows didn't have a master plan for the film – no storyboards, no prepared narrative – and he made that clear from the off. This was probably wise: like so much around the Roses, there was a sense that everything might fall apart at any minute. You can see this when, in the middle of the European tour, the run-up to the Heaton Park gigs, Reni quits the band, finishing the set but refusing to come back onstage for an encore. Ian Brown explains to the 5,000-strong audience that "the drummer's a cunt", as they scream abuse at him. Love curdles in an instant. The reason the band refused interviews was because they didn't want to talk about why they split up the first time around. "They'd only just got over it and got back together in the same room," says Meadows. "Once they shook hands and got on with it, it was never talked about."

When Reni walked, Meadows switched the camera off: "The band were more important to me than getting a Michael Moore exposé." There's one shot of the band looking miserable in an airport, but otherwise, that's it. Anyone who's searching for the definitive explanation as to why Reni left in 2012, let alone why he left in 1995, or why Squire quit a year later, won't get it from Made of Stone. There are hints – bad sound in Amsterdam, Brown and Reni arguing during Second Coming, what Mani calls "the loss of momentum", Reni's disdain for fame – but nothing concrete. Did he want to pry more?

"I think all human beings have this instinctive nosiness, where you would love to find out what went on," says Meadows. "And like a lot of Stone Roses fans, I sort of did, but I sort of didn't. Things are hinted at, and you get a sense through people's voices, but all the interviews are from different times before they got back together, so it's not definitive. I like that, it gives the film texture. We live in a culture where we get given everything, as soon as we want it. So in a way, it's really nice to say to people: 'No, you're not having that.' Because ultimately when you give people the intimate stuff they want, they consume it and they spit it out. No one actually cares."

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Meadows was living in Uttoxeter, near Stoke, he would go to Madchester nights at the local town hall. The DJ played the Charlatans, the Wedding Present, Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses: everything was much of a muchness, though the Roses were acknowledged as the daddies of the scene. Shane, who started receding at 17, still managed to grow a Madchester wedge, which he dyed blond and combined with a moustache: "We were coming out of that sports, trackie phase, what can I say?" He wore red dungarees, which faded to pink over multiple washes; also a poncho with an Aztec symbol on the front, which his friend bought for him at Affleck's Palace in Manchester. Only 40 minutes away from Uttoxeter, "but it might as well have been 1,000 miles away".

The Stone Roses meant more to Meadows than other bands: at college, he met a girl who was an art student – "the first girl I went out with that wasn't a hairdresser" – and when he first got off with her, Waterfall was playing in the background. "I thought, this is the life!" He and his friends bought tickets for the Roses' Spike Island gig, but the night before, Meadows took acid and everything went bad. Almost immediately, he could tell that his evening wasn't going to be pleasant, and went to the pub toilet to make himself throw up. But it was no good: 12 hours of living hell followed, culminating in Meadows finding himself at a bonfire by a river "with a load of goths". He looked at his Spike Island ticket and thought: "There'll be 30,000 people there tomorrow, I'm going to get stabbed." So he gave it away. The next day all his friends went without him. And that was that.

There's a section in Made of Stone that is based around the Stone Roses' surprise warm-up gig at Parr Hall in Warrington, near Manchester. It's announced at 4pm that the band will be playing that evening and that tickets are free to the first 1,000 people who turn up with something that shows they're a fan: an album, an old T-shirt, a ticket to the Heaton Park gig. You see people running, queuing, getting in; being kept out, left standing by the barriers.

There are some beautiful impromptu speeches by the Warrington fans, who are mostly middle-aged and manic in their devotion. One says: "There's a reason why I've still got my hair like this, there's a reason why I've never worn a tie, there's a reason why I listen to that album at least once a week and it still makes me tingle." Another, post-gig: "You know when you get an album and you play it when you have a great time, you play it when people pass on, when you get married, when your kids are born… It makes you feel good that further down the line, things come good." Meadows loves these homilies, thinks he couldn't have written them better himself. Actually, the Warrington section is the part of the film that is most like his others. "Kitchen sink" he calls his style, though his films are funnier and more contemporary than that. Meadows is great at finding the heart in people, showing us the emotion that drives the most everyday of lives.

Warrington is also the very first time that Meadows himself sees the Roses play live: he tells us this as they walk on stage, and you can feel his nerves and excitement. Watching the gig, you remember another reason why the Stone Roses mean so much to so many. Their concerts are the audience's too: the crowd take over, sing along to every word. Critics always made much of the fact that Ian Brown's voice is weak – and in Parr Hall he is off-key – but it simply doesn't matter. "Everybody is a star" is a Roses mantra, and, at their best gigs, everybody is. Warrington is one of those.

It was Warrington that really made Meadows think he had a movie. He was wary of making what he calls "one of those BBC documentaries", where everything is filmed from the back of a room and nothing is filmic, epic or strange. So, in the final part of Made of Stone, when we see the band play Heaton Park, Meadows drops out the sound of the crowd altogether, leaving us to appreciate an extended, psychedelic version of Fool's Gold, marvel at the musicianship of John Squire, Mani and Reni. Near the beginning, he films a rehearsal in black and white, with a camera close up on each band member: we witness that intense, more-than-the-sum connection that sometimes comes when four people create music together. It makes me think of the Roses' reunion press conference when Mani said: "When bands play together, that unseen member comes in and there's something happening musically, it's magical."

But the shot that makes Made of Stone is the opening one. Filmed by Laurie Rose (no relation), the film's director of photography, it pans the front row of the fans at Heaton Park as Ian Brown moves along, slapping outstretched hands. You see the fans' wild, transported faces, screaming; you see Brown's – his geometric cheekbones, unfathomable eyes. He takes someone's mobile phone, films himself and the crowd, gives it back. All in one unbroken, slo-mo shot. And over the top, we hear Alfred Hitchcock, of all people, talking about creativity. It's mesmeric.

"When I saw that shot it was the closest thing I felt to when I'm making a drama," says Meadows. "When you're watching it and having palpitations because it's so good and you're just thinking, 'Get to the end! Get to the end without anyone making a mistake!' I spent ages looking for a scientist talking about volatility in scientific elements to put over it, but I couldn't find anything. The Hitchcock thing just felt right: it says we're not going to shy away from the fact that this is a complex animal, we're not going to smack you on the nose in a cheesy way. It has its own mojo and it stops people thinking, Oh, it's Shane Meadows, we're going to be driving around in the back of a van."

Meadows is funny about what he sees as his limitations as a film-maker, almost always caused by lack of budget: "I've never filmed anything that hasn't had restrictions put on what I want to do." But now he's made Made of Stone, which required an enormous film crew, with cameras on each band member, on the crowd, on the overall scene, he feels differently. His next two projects are the final part of the This Is England series, This Is England '90 (shades of the pink dungaree years: ages ago, he told me this would open with someone putting an ecstasy tablet on their tongue); and the story of cyclist Tommy Simpson, the first Briton ever to wear the yellow jersey, who died cycling up Mont Ventoux. The Simpson story requires re-creating and filming the Tour de France in the 1960s, a tricky challenge, "but I'm not scared of it any more," he says. "If I wanted to make a film about a medieval king and a war, I feel like I could now, because I've had 35 cameras at one gig. I don't always have to film people in flats getting knocked about."

For now, though, after the film premiere, Meadows is going to take some time off. "Weld the car, play Lego with my boys, paint the house." He is relieved; not just because he'll be spending time with his family but because, despite his nerves, despite the will-they-won't-they nature of the Roses, Made of Stone has been a happy experience. "They always say don't meet your heroes, don't they? And I was worried because the Roses are cool; they take a lot in their stride and I never was cool. I had that needy desire, wanting them to love me, what if they didn't like me, told me to go…? But I kept thinking, well, even if the film doesn't happen, it was worth it because of this. Like I saw them play Bye Bye Badman in rehearsal, me sitting on the sofa next to Ian Brown, and my heart was thumping so hard, I nearly had a heart attack. I filmed them playing Waterfall in rehearsal. I went to Warrington and saw them play live for the first time ever…

"And the risk was that I would damage my dream, working so closely with them, or that I would get complacent about their music. But if anything, I've fallen in love with them and their music even more. This film is the closest thing to a love letter that I've ever made."

The Stone Roses: Made of Stone is in cinemas nationwide from 5 June