One of the most beguiling films making its debut at the 45th New York Film Festival is a gorgeously photographed, highly personal, and courageously intimate look at Bob Dylan’s ever-changing identity. But it’s not called “I’m Not There” and it was not directed by Todd Haynes. In Murray Lerner’s “The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963–65,” only one performer impersonates Bob Dylan — Mr. Dylan himself. Mr. Lerner’s film cobbles footage of Mr. Dylan rehearsing, playing, and interacting with fans at the Newport Folk Festival between 1963 and 1965 into a chronological look at the evolution of both the artist and his audience.

“The title is meant to be ironic,” Mr. Lerner said. Unlike the glibly phrased superlative that Mr. Dylan has sought to shrug off since it was pinned to him, “he’s not the mirror of his generation. He went way beyond just reflecting what was around him.”

Though some of the film’s footage (notably Mr. Dylan’s storied electric performance with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1965) appeared in Mr. Lerner’s 1968 Oscar-nominated Newport compilation, “Festival,” as well as in Martin Scorsese’s recent “No Direction Home,” by Mr. Lerner’s estimation, some 70% of “The Other Side of the Mirror” has remained unseen until now.

“Festival” was the end result of an effort to both satisfy the archival needs of the Newport organizers and Mr. Lerner’s own desire to capture the ’60s folk scene as “a crucible for the youth counterculture I saw happening.” But the three pivotal years, from 1963 to 1965, also bore witness to Mr. Dylan’s personal crucible as his persona transformed from an amiable Woody Guthrie clone in 1963 to a shades-clad rock star ecstatically performing and provoking in 1965.

“This thing stuck in my mind, that the change in Dylan was so dramatic that I have to show it,” Mr. Lerner said.

By the time of the first Newport shoot, a solo afternoon workshop performance during which a 22-year-old Mr. Dylan charismatically balances sharp sarcasm and “aw shucks” sincerity, filmmaker and muse had already crossed paths several times. Mr. Lerner recalled seeing Mr. Dylan in impromptu performances at a party hosted by the downtown folk-scene tastemaker Cynthia Gooding.

“I think it was ’61 or ’62,” he said. “In walked this kid who took out his guitar, sang some songs, didn’t say a word, closed his guitar case, and walked out. I knew then and there that this was a guy I had to find and eventually I did.”

Though the two men partnered on some of the most paradigmatic concert footage ever put to film, Messrs. Lerner and Dylan have preserved a discrete social distance for some 40 years.

“I feel bad that I never did get to know him,” Mr. Lerner said. “But I don’t think it would’ve been possible. I didn’t think he was the kind of guy you could sit down and chat with, and I still don’t.”

Instead, their peripheral acquaintance has been a case, to paraphrase Robert Frost, of good fences making for good collaborators. Rather than Mr. Dylan’s attention or company, “it was more his artistry that interested me,” Mr. Lerner said.

In addition to capturing the artist’s unsurpassed ability to remain of the moment during three of the most socially and artistically tumultuous years in American popular culture, “The Other Side of the Mirror,” which will screen twice on Saturday, also documents the infancy of the art of filming modern live performances. When Mr. Lerner was initially approached to shoot the Newport Folk Festival, concert films like “Monterey Pop” and “Woodstock” still lay in the future. The 1963 footage of Mr. Dylan in “The Other Side of the Mirror” bears subtly exciting witness to film language being written for the first time. Mr. Lerner cites Bert Stern’s 1960 documentary portrait of the Newport Jazz Festival, “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” as an influence. “I thought it was very well photographed,” he said of Mr. Stern’s film. Taking a page from Mr. Stern’s style book, Mr. Lerner photographed Mr. Dylan circa 1963 using unobtrusive telephoto lenses.

Mr. Lerner cites a different influence when discussing the complimentary growth of both Mr. Dylan’s music and his own filmmaking aesthetic.

“A guy working with us was reading Marshall McLuhan,” he said. “I disagree with McLuhan a lot but what he said in this case was the form of something should impart the meaning of it.” The filmmaker realized the a concert film’s meaning was to be “visual music,” rather than to serve as an anonymous and unobtrusive witness. “The way to photograph music is to feel it,” he said.

Nowhere is this conviction more clear than in the remarkable footage of Mr. Dylan’s rehearsal and subsequent 1965 performance alongside the brilliantly fractious and energetic electric guitarist Mike Bloomfield and other members of the Butterfield Blues Band. Unlike the most vocal members of the audience that night, Mr. Lerner “was already sensitized to electric music,” he said. “I felt a hypnotic quality about electric music. It sort of hypnotizes people in a way. It grabs your body. I couldn’t wait to see what this guy Dylan would do with this power.”

Though the show itself has been falsely recorded in rock history as a kind of guerrilla theater confrontation with a uniformly hostile audience, Mr. Lerner estimates that the crowd reaction was “evenly divided between one-third antagonistic, one-third kind of disturbed but not really antagonistic, and one-third who liked it. It’s hard to tell because the antagonistic people are always louder,” he said. “Enjoyment can be very quiet.”

And Mr. Lerner’s reaction to Todd Haynes’s provocative Dylan portrait? “It’s well photographed,” he offered, but “it’s not my thing.” Both Mr. Lerner’s nonfiction mosaic and Mr. Haynes fictionalized reverie invoke, in Mr. Lerner’s words, “the protean shift in identity” that has become Mr. Dylan’s hallmark. But, Mr. Lerner points out, there is one substantial difference between the two filmmakers’ apprehension of the most formidable of music icons. Mr. Lerner’s film “is not ‘I’m Not There,'” he laughed, “because I was there!”