Newport & The Great Folk Dream (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for each new song
Take a Drink: for each outright legend
Do a Shot: uggh… electric guitar
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
For an awful lot of the movie-going audience, the Newport Folk Festival will conjure up visions of Dylan going Electric from last year’s A Complete Unknown.
Newport & The Great Folk Dream does indeed get to that, but it’s much more- a history of a uniquely diverse music festival displaying a dizzying array of America’s homegrown music styles and those they’d go on to inspire.
A Toast
Newport & The Great Folk Dream is comprised of footage that hasn’t been seen since it was shot in the early 60s live at the festival. The buried treasures that director Robert Gordon was able to uncover includes some of the only footage of these performances that even exists.
It’s not hard to believe that this took so long to recognize for the caretakers of this film stock to realize what they had when you watch – Newport’s famously social commingling of every race, class, and nationality is on display here, with as much great music happening on motel verandas and in rented house parties as on the famous stage. We witness just an absolute gamut of musical legends from folk, blues, gospel, bluegrass, and much more play, and its not hard to see how such varied and fertile soil would be the ideal conditions for the roots of rock and popular music to branch out and grow.
It’s not all performance footage, either, as Gordon mixes in interviews with those that brought the festival to life or were lucky enough to have experienced it firsthand. It also delves into how it contributed to Civil Rights cause, although it’s not afraid to show how it wasn’t always a place of outright social enlightenment, either. With the changing of the times came a changes for good and ill in both this music scene and the society that surrounded it, but the Festival remains vital to this day.
Beer Two
The focus is on showing as many of the performances as possible, and it’s pretty much impossible to disagree with that sentiment. However, a bit more context around its enduring impact would have been worth an extra 10-15 minutes of runtime.
Verdict
Newport & The Great Folk Dream is an incredible document of a seminal time in music and social history, as well as one hell of a concert film.
