Director Andrei Ujica blends archival footage with animation and narration for a unique feature that’s built around, but never actually shows, the band’s iconic 1965 Shea Stadium concert.

One could watch Andrei Ujica’s TWST: Things We Said Today, a new documentary about the Beatles’ iconic August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, and come away feeling frustrated that the actual August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium is not, in fact, featured onscreen.

Hence my warning to you, because it would be a sad thing indeed if this lovely, eye-opening, complexly experiential (and experimental) picture disappointed anybody.

Fans of the Fab Four know, of course, that The Beatles at Shea Stadium is already a thing that exists, or at least existed, though it has been mired in various rights kerfuffles for years.

This documentary is primarily in line with the temporal disconnects of the Paul McCartney-penned titular song — which isn’t heard here, but which McCartney has referred to as “future nostalgia.”

TWST begins on Aug. 13, 1965, as the Beatles arrive in New York City. They’re the biggest band in the world, but much of the talk from local journalists — featured here interviewing fans, peppering the quartet with press conference questions and offering commentary across several mediums — is about the possibility that the Beatles might already have been usurped by other bands. For the screaming fans, John, Paul, George and Ringo couldn’t be more representative of the present. To cynical reporters, they’re the past (or perhaps those reporters are already stuck in the past themselves). And as viewers, we exist in a spectral middle ground between future, past and present.

Bear with me, because this is about to get a little dizzying: We’re taken through the day by several guides, including Geoffrey O’Brien, the teenaged reporter son of a legendary NYC DJ, and Judith Kristen, an eager adolescent concertgoer. Kristen’s words, voiced by Therese Azzara, are from her diary; O’Brien’s, performed by Tommy McCabe, from what the press notes call an “autofictional account.” Both are woven together with fragments from Ujica’s fictional short story, “Isabela, the Friend of the Butterflies.”

So we’re hearing actors reciting words that are real, except for when they’re not. The characters are visualized by artist Yann Kebbi as raw, flickering drawings overlaid atop the documentary imagery to lead us around the city. Geoffrey takes multiple cabs, going through the rough streets of Harlem and the Fulton fish market before dawn. As he gets closer and closer to the show, he simultaneously takes us further and further from our conventional expectations of this movie. Geoffrey’s journey eventually intersects in spirit with Judith’s, which includes picking up several friends and making an extended detour at the World’s Fair, which was at Flushing Meadows that year.

If you’re familiar at all with the concept of the World’s Fair (older readers are like, “Duh!” and younger readers are like, “Huh?”), you’ll know the exposition celebrated achievements from the past and predicted achievements of the future. See how that fits? One can only imagine Ujica’s pleasure at realizing that these two major events were taking place within yards of each other.