A joyous musical flashback to more innocent, idealistic times, Newport & the Great Folk Dream revisits the early years of Newport Folk Festival, the Rhode Island gathering that become a launchpad for Bob Dylan’s career and a laboratory for the emerging hippie counterculture. Featuring an eclectic range of live performance clips from 60 years ago, many never seen on film before, director Robert Gordon’s archive-driven documentary has been one of the more uplifting world premieres at the Venice film festival this week. In his Venice press notes, Gordon stresses this timely exercise in jingle-jangle mourning for a kinder, more liberal, more socially conscious America “could not be more relevant to this 21st century political moment.”
Coming so soon after James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024), which dramatised Dylan’s controversial switch from acoustic troubadour to electric rocker at Newport festival in 1965, will also help Gordon’s film reach a wider potential audience, engaging younger fans as well as nostalgic Baby Boomers. Indeed, Mangold’s hit bio-drama may have helped get this project commissioned in the first place. With Dylan featured prominently alongside Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Pete Seeger and dozens more, Newport & the Great Folk Dream is sure to tour more festivals after Venice, with an encore likely to follow on big or small screen.
The raw material for Newport & the Great Folk Dream was shot between 1963 and 1966 by film-maker Murray Lerner, who directed a previous Newport documentary, the Oscar-nominated Festival! (1967) Some footage of the bigger names, especially Dylan, has been widely circulated ever since. But Gordon and his team have mostly unearthed previously unseen clips from Lerner’s 80-hour archive including John Lee Hooker, Phil Ochs, Odetta, the Staples Singers, Peter, Paul & Mary and many others. Dave Van Ronk, who later inspired the ill-fated folk-scene anti-hero of the Coen brothers film Inside Llewyn Davies (2013), also appears.
Gordon has a solid track record of diligent, prize-winning, music-themed films and books on subjects including Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, and Stax Records. He also co-directed Best of Enemies (2019), the Oscar-nominated documentary about the bitter personal feud between Gore Vidal and William Buckley Jr. His approach here is sober, meticulous and formally traditional, interweaving monochrome archive footage and interview fragments with a smattering of more recent voice-over audio clips from musicians, festival organisers and other Newport veterans.
Although Lerner’s original film had a jumbled chronology and limited background detail, Gordon brings more narrative shape, tracking the festival’s growth from Kennedy-era egalitarian boutique event to mainstream music industry showcase, struggling to adapt while Beatlemania caused seismic ripples in the pop landscape. There is also some enjoyably bitchy backstage gossip. In archive audio clips, Lerner (who died in 2017) recalls “bickering and squabbling and animosity” between the festival’s board members, with folk purists lined up against others who championed the music as a living, evolving art form. Neither legendary musical archivist Alan Lomax nor Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman emerge from the film with much glory, the pair even getting into a brawl at one point.
An added dimension that Gordon brings to Lerner’s raw material is political context, reframing the festival’s progressive liberal legacy with the wider hindsight of history. Seeger was a key force here, insisting to Newport’s promoter George Wein that every performer got the same 50 dollar fee. “It wasn’t a communist thing” Wein exlains, “it was brotherhood and sisterhood.” James Forman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, plus Charles Neblett and Rutha Harris of the group’s associated band The Freedom Singers, also stress the festival’s connections with Civil Rights and protest marches. “We didn’t consider ourselves performers, we were activists,” Harris says. “Because freedom is a constant struggle.”
Gordon also makes a strong case for Newport’s wider pop-culture significance, boosting not just the folk revival but also resurgence interest in antique blues and country music, bringing old-time performers like Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Doc Boggs back to the stage for the first tine in decades. The festival also pioneered the kind of globalised bill that would come to be called “world music”, inviting artists from Africa, the Middle East, Francophone Canada and other regions beyond the Anglosphere. Despite the film’s narrow focus on Newport’s breakthrough 1960s period, the festival is still going today, having survived a few bumpy periods over the decades. Bob Dylan finally returned to play in 2002, wearing a long wig and fake beard. Why? Because he can.
Stylistically limited by its strict adherence to Lerner’s vintage footage, Newport & the Great Folk Dream does little fresh with the music documentary format. But behind its deceptively austere, artless, hand-held aesthetic this deep dive into musical history is actually slickly edited and elegantly structured, with a strikingly clear, cleaned-up audio soundtrack. Gordon and his team even confess to using AI software to polish up a couple of degraded clips from the vaults, but any digital tweaks are very subtle. If Dylan can get away with going electric, so can they.
Director: Robert Gordon
Cinematography: Murray Lerner, George Pickow, Stanley Meredith, Francis Grumman
Editing: Laura Jean Hocking
Producer: Jo Lauro
Production company: Folk Explosion
World sales: Submarine Entertainment, New York
Venue: Venice Film Festival (out of competition)
In English
99 minutes
