“Newport & the Great Folk Dream” is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power. The movie tells the story of the Newport Folk Festival from the pivotal years of 1963 to 1966, and when I say that it “tells the story,” I mean that there’s a surprisingly sharp and resonant narrative at play we haven’t seen before. Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary “Festival” covered those same years, but that film was more of a scattershot folk and blues and country collage.

It turns out that Lerner, who died in 2017, shot 100 hours of footage at Newport, almost all of which got stuck in a vault; it has never been seen before. That’s the footage that director Robert Gordon and his editor and producing partner,

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