Call it a save-the-planet act of recycling. Call it late-career reflections. Call it shameless profiteering in the age of canned nostalgia and "reality" entertainment. But old-guard documentary filmmakers of the cinéma-vérité movement - commonly fecund with outtakes due to the freewheeling nature of their shoots - have lately excavated their leftovers from the vaults and reworked the vintage celluloid into all "new" features. Thus Albert Maysles revealed hitherto-unseen Grey Gardens material. Murray Lerner ran all his Bob Dylan footage from the Newport Folk Festival into one Dylanathon. And now D.A. Pennebaker's legendary Bob Dylan ride-along, Don't Look Back, has been appended with previously unused stuff as 65 Revisited.

It's said when the ascendant Dylan hooked up with filmmaker Pennebaker via Time-Life employee Sara Lowndes (who would become the first Mrs. Dylan) in a deal to follow the 24-year-old Bob on his two-week tour of England in 1965, the musician never dreamed the results would see a theatrical release two years later and become part of his lasting legacy. Dylan has never really liked or endorsed Don't Look Back, and even critics were initially pretty cold to Pennebaker's lens-eye-view of the unguarded and impish young Dylan mouthing off at irritating press conferences, notably drunk as he and his cohorts argue over who trashed their posh room at the Savoy Hotel. What infuriated Dylanaholics was Pennebaker's eschewing concert footage, finding more drama in informal hotel-room jams and in Dylan's snarky responses to the seemingly endless parade of journos and hangers-on.

65 Revisited is like an alternate cut of Don't Look Back, more positive about its leading man. Here indeed is Bob Dylan, sober and generally well-behaved, if a little bemused at all the fuss, strategizing with one of the Beatles' associates about escape routes from female fans - but when he meets some enthusiastic Manchester schoolgirls Dylan's a gent. A reporter compares Dylan to John Lennon, and the former seems flattered by it. In concert he performs "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" in Liverpool and later, "She Belongs to Me" (from which the lyric "She don't look back" derives). Great stuff, that. Capping it is a London rooftop variation of Pennebaker's classic "Positively Fourth Street" - arguably the birth of the MTV music video - even though Dylan's visibly unenthused about doing it. On the fringes are Nico (even this icon of self-destruction seems upbeat, chatting about showbiz like a cheerful ingenue) and Joan Baez, in fine voice - if looking a little sad about something. Her relationship with Dylan was crumbling at the time.

Does 65 Revisited maintain the tight structure and narrative drive of Don't Look Back? Hardly. Could Pennebaker have made an even better film by including this material? Very possibly. And that warrants this a major footnote in rockumentary history, if not one heckuva DVD extra. Now maybe Pennebaker and Dylan can finally show us Eat the Document, their follow-up feature collaboration (co-starring John Lennon, incidentally) that Dylan has steadfastly refused to issue commercially.

65 Revisited: 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 9 at Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall.