Murray Lerner’s 1967 film “Festival!” issued on DVD for the first time today, is the definitive document of the Newport Folk festivals. But, like all great music films, its true subject is much deeper – in this case the birth and growing pains of a generation’s musical and social consciousness. “I could see the tug of war between conformity to tradition and the attempt express something more,” Lerner told me recently at his Midtown office. “It was using folk music as a means of creating a counterculture movement, and I thought that would make a film.”

Even those who haven’t seen “Festival!” may recognize parts of it, as large chunks were used by Martin Scorsese in the recent Bob Dylan documentary “No Direction Home.” But unlike Scorsese, who uses the footage to trace Dylan’s rise and electric apostasy at the 1965 Festival, Lerner takes a more panoptic and poetic view of the moment. He orders his shots nonsequentially, mixing footage from 1963 to 1966 to highlight contrasts and tensions within the burgeoning folk movement. And tensions abound – between old and young, traditional and original, acoustic and electric, political and commercial.

The result is a stunningly prescient portrait of 1960s youth culture. “Festival!” reminds us that the early 1960s looked a lot like the late 1950s. There are no long-hairs, and only a smattering of beards and beads – barely a hint of the psychedelic turmoil to come. Newport is populated by a legion of crew cut kids – mostly white early on – wearing college sweatshirts and trying to find their way out of the model-home conformity of the 1950s.

They’ve discovered an identity and set of values in folk music, and they assemble at Newport to deepen their faith; also to expand their musical repertoires, for they come to participate, not just spectate. “We believe in the idea that the average man and woman can make his own music,” says Pete Seeger, who appears as a kind of avatar of the early folk revival. “In this machine age, it doesn’t all have to come out of a loudspeaker.” In keeping with this spirit, concertgoers gather in little clutches between sets to play their own songs – on guitars, jugs, banjos, harmonicas, washboards, pots and pans, whatever they can get their hands on.

Newport was a conscious effort to build bridges between the present and past. Mixed in with rising folk stars like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary were representatives of folk styles that predated the pop music industry: fife and drum bands, church choirs, square dance troops, a woman who made music by slapping her cheeks.

“I read in the Bible says the older men teach the younger ones,” says a deeply wrinkled Mississippi John Hurt. “I’m glad I’ve got something they want.” A series of juxtapositions follow: a polka-dotted Dylan practicing with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, white-haired fiddle players, toothless bluesmen. An elderly Appalachian woman, who looks like she is straight out of an old WPA photo, says to the camera, “What we call folk now, 200 or 300 years ago probably was pop. You see, we change.” We’re witnessing the passing of the torch – one that will be used to burn the very bridge Newport constructed.

Cue “Maggie’s Farm,” the first song from Dylan’s watershed electric Newport set. Many in the crowd no doubt recognized it as an update to the traditional song “Penny’s Farm,” included on the much-studied “Anthology of American Folk Music.” Dylan was spurning tradition in its own language, but also incorporating it: “I try my best to be just like I am / but everybody wants you to be just like them / they say ‘sing while you slave,’ I just get bored / I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more,” he sneers.

The parable of Dylan at Newport is often read as one of artistic vision triumphing over conformity, but seen through the wider-angle-lens of “Festival!” it is also the story of a disrupted harmony. It’s not just electricity that intrudes on this musical Arcadia, but the alienating machinery of stardom. Baez does her best to be gracious with her growing legion of fans, signing all the autographs and touching all the hands. Dylan, meanwhile, broods in the back of his car, besieged by onlookers. Together they offer a glimpse of the pressures that will tear the culture apart.

In this, “Festival!” might be best understood as a companion to Lerner’s later film “Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival.” Where Newport drew 70,000 people in 1964, “Britain’s Woodstock” attracted more than 600,000 in 1970, despite being held on an isolated island accessible only by boat. In the intervening years, the eager youth culture of Newport has grown ugly and hard. Mike Bloomfield’s reverence for his blues progenitors has mutated into the Who’s “Young Man Blues,” which preaches generational warfare. Respectful protest has given way to carnival and anarchy, “a psychedelic concentration camp,” in the words of one astute crank, complete with guard dogs and inmate riots.

And then there’s the money. At Newport, everyone – whether Bob Dylan or an unknown fife player – was paid a nominal performance fee. At Isle of Wight, cash is everywhere – in bags, in piles. Tiny Tim’s ukelele “doesn’t tune up” without it.

“Festival!” is the first chapter in a coming of age story – one that will have an unhappy ending. An early shot in “Festival!” shows wide-eyed throngs pouring into grassy, virginal festival grounds; Wight ends with a deserted field, smoldering and garbage strewn. Between them a generation’s idealism and innocence has been lost.