‘Newport & the Great Folk Dream’ Review: A Rapturous Documentary Shows You Why the Newport Folk Festival Was Electric Even When It Was Acoustic

The documentary "Newport & the Great Folk Dream" offers an elegant and transportive experience, weaving a surprisingly sharp narrative from the Newport Folk Festival's pivotal era between 1963 and 1966. While Murray Lerner's 1967 film "Festival" presented a scattershot collage of the same period, this new work draws from a previously unseen treasure trove: nearly 100 hours of footage Lerner shot, which remained locked in a vault until directors Robert Gordon and Laura Jean Hocking constructed this richer, more ingeniously structured vision. "Festival" was merely adequate, but "Newport & the Great Folk Dream" feels essential, poised to captivate not only lifelong devotees of American roots music but also a new generation of folk-adjacent fans ignited by recent cultural touchstones like "A Complete Unknown." Ultimately, this is a film that transcends genre labels, making it a must-see for music lovers of every stripe.

The film's narrative is anchored by the legendary 1965 moment when Bob Dylan went electric, a performance that mythology holds single-handedly changed folk music. However, the documentary masterfully expands our understanding of this event in two critical ways. It first provides a broad and exquisitely chosen selection of the festival's music, giving viewers a profound sense of the tradition Dylan was disrupting. Simultaneously, it reveals that the festival was already in a state of evolution. The real shift began in 1964, following the seismic cultural impact of The Beatles' arrival in America earlier that year. Beatlemania, arguably more than Dylan's act, signaled the decline of folk as the dominant populist form. Electric instruments were already appearing on Newport stages, as seen in a raging blues performance by Howlin' Wolf. The crowd's spirit evolved in tandem, morphing from a stately, lawn-chair audience into a looser, more party-oriented gathering that prefigured the roots of Woodstock.

The film posits that the "folk dream" was a vision of diverse musical styles uniting into a community with spiritual and political power—a dream largely championed by Pete Seeger. Seeger, a folk icon who had been dragged in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1955 for his refusal to name names, was a key organizer. In a radical move emblematic of this ethos, Seeger convinced the 1963 festival board to pay every performer the same fee: $50. The music from that year burns with this idealism, from the earthy traditionalism of Clarence Ashley & Doc Watson's "The Coo Coo Bird" to the primal force of the Moving Star Hall Singers' "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," a sound reminiscent of the field recordings by legendary ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. This 1963 festival, in many ways, served as a cultural prelude to the historic March on Washington that occurred just one month later.

By 1964, the festival's spirit grew more seductively unruly and personal. Alongside traditional sopranos like Joan Baez and Judy Collins, the lineup featured the anarchic stomp of the Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers, a young Buffy Sainte-Marie singing about addiction in "Co'dine," and global music from Egypt to Hawaii. The folk world's ideal of acoustic purity was becoming an anachronism. As one folk historian notes, "The debates backstage between purists like Lomax and Seeger were essentially about adjudicating the soul of folk itself, just as the genre was being reinvented on stage." The great irony, the film suggests, is that while Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" had been a challenge to the old guard, by 1965 it was the folk purists who were suddenly on the "old road," struggling to adjust to the very change Dylan had prophesied.

"Newport & the Great Folk Dream" makes it abundantly clear that Dylan's revolutionary electric set was not performed in a vacuum. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who backed him after a hasty rehearsal, were already on the bill. The entire festival's energy was erupting in a new direction, with electric guitars wielded by The Chambers Brothers and even Peter, Paul and Mary delivering an enthralling intensity. By the time Dylan took the stage for "Maggie's Farm," the groundwork had been laid. As folk singer Loudon Wainwright III perfectly summarizes, "There was some sanctimony about folk music... Well, that night, Dylan fucked with it." The film presents the 1966 festival as an epilogue, the moment the dream of folk as a world-changing force ended, supplanted by rock 'n' roll and the rising culture of the self. While the boos that greeted Dylan were for the messenger who let down his followers, the film stands as a testament to both the beautiful purity that was lost and the transformative power that remains.