It will have escaped nobody’s attention that Bob Dylan recently turned eighty, a birthday that heralded the arrival of Rough and Rowdy Ways, his thirty-ninth studio album, which met with universal acclaim and topped the charts in the UK.

That release was preceded by the stately roll-out of three songs, the first of which was the seventeen-minute epic “Murder Most Foul”, not in fact a retelling of the 1964 Miss Marple movie starring Margaret Rutherford, but rather a kaleidoscopic meditation on the Kennedy assassination, more free-association beat poem than song, that dropped like a stealth bomb in the middle of the pandemic. With the physical release of the album, the song was thoughtfully cordoned off on its own side of the CD and LP, so you don’t have to listen to it every time.

Death is not the end, Dylan has sung, but preparations are being made for the possibility: a legacy considered, fragments shored, packages repackaged, copyrights renewed, ribbons tied. Dylan’s late style, which kicked off with Love & Theft (released on September 11, 2001, and the last album to feature a photograph of the singer on its cover) may be his last style: time will tell. Dylan, after all, is only human. And, like many eighty-year-olds of your acquaintance, he hasn’t been travelling a lot recently, presumably a huge frustration for a performer who played an average of eighty-six shows per year throughout his seventies (three times as many as he played in the actual 70s), concerts which involve strenuous travel, however luxurious the tour bus. He was last onstage on December 8, 2019, in Washington DC.

Dylan, notoriously shy of cameras not under his control, therefore surprised everyone with the announcement of his first live stream broadcast, Shadow Kingdom, which aired worldwide, on July 18, his first refresher since the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways. After the onslaught of the eightieth – the obligatory accolades and retrospectives, not to mention a Babel of new biographies – it is a genuine pleasure to turn to the art itself, particularly in a new presentation.

If Dylan, despite being drawn like a moth to film’s flame, has never convinced as a cinematic auteur, his relationship with television has been actively adversarial ever since he walked off The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963. Yet here we find ourselves firmly in the world of the TV Special, in what amounts to an elegant series of music videos, each featuring Dylan miming a newly-minted version of a famous song. We can assume that Shadow Kingdom’s executive producer Max Ice is the same person as Jack Frost, the pseudonym Dylan has used for production credits, and here Frost/Ice has wisely handed the directorial reins to Alma Har’el, who directed the film Honey Boy (2019) from a screenplay by Shia LeBeouf.

Shadow Kingdom takes place, ostensibly, in the juke joint of Dylan’s dreams, where expectations of him are zero, where he can play what he likes, where he is not expected to introduce the songs, and no one will yell “BOBBY! WE LOVE YOU!” repeatedly throughout the tenderest moments of the set. In fact, we don’t hear a peep from the audience at all, nor even any ambient noise, let alone any clapping, though it is also true that the music never stops, each song segueing into the next with delicate bridging passages (thereby precluding the need for Dylan to say anything). By the end of the show, a brunette is lounging onstage, enjoying a cold beer. One can’t expect such restraint in the real world.

It is, in fact, as though the whole performance is Dylan’s fantasy; I would guess that it is an even greater dream of his to play this perfect simulacrum of a roadhouse than it is ours to see him play there. In this kingdom, Dylan is the old bluesman he’s always told us he is: the song and dance man, the tambourine man, singing that old-time religion (the only salvation he needs) where the gospel and rock and roll are interchangeable. One is reminded of “One More Cup of Coffee” on Desire (1976), when Dylan sings: “He oversees his kingdom so no stranger does intrude”. This is Dylan’s kingdom. He is the law.

And a very stylish, not to say comically stylized, kingdom it is, too, as Dylan and his masked string band entertain the small but ever-changing audience, which is as protean as Dylan’s wardrobe. It’s all beautifully mounted, to Downton Abbey levels of period detail: each individual slat on the blind seems artisanally distressed as the dirty AC blows tinsel streamers – the only real “live stream” on offer – that catch the light perfectly through the fog of cigarette smoke. All this is sumptuously realized in high contrast by the cinematographer, Lol Crawley. It’s real life made timeless by desaturation, when things were black and white.

The audience itself is racially integrated, more diverse than any Dylan audience, perhaps, since 1963, when he performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game” at the March on Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I Have a Dream” speech: the fine line between diversity, positive discrimination, tokenism and cultural appropriation is one that the Nobel Laureate has always been notably unafraid to tread. This audience dances suggestively (not to mention creepily and as if hypnotized) to “Pledging My Time”, a slow 1966 blues in which Dylan accurately laments “The room is so stuffy / I can hardly breathe”. (Perhaps the band are masked to avoid the secondhand smoke.) For “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, however, a new set of disinterested barflies resemble the cast of Ironweed, but the setting rather suggests the lawless border town in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. After all, Welles’s Los Robles was a facsimile of the very town Dylan mentions in the first line: “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez”. The other filmmaker who comes to mind is David Lynch: it’s all simultaneously reminiscent of two Twin Peaks locations, the Bang Bang Bar and the Red Room, that similarly black-and-white linoleumed extra-dimensional contact zone between realities.

These hard-drinking chain-smoking extras in the audience are in the amusing position of pretending that the bloke playing the songs isn’t Bob Dylan, that they’ve never heard any of the songs, and that they mustn’t register they have any idea why they’re there; it’s 1936, they’re down on their luck, and Dorothea Lange has just asked if she can get out her Graflex 4×5.

This is the noirish landscape of lost Americana that Dylan has been mining in his cover art for some time. He has not only been drawing from it, but drawing and painting it, too, most recently in a series called The Beaten Path. Shadow Kingdom opens with “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, which in a fairly literal sense he still strives to do, even as the rest of us know he managed it ages ago. Perhaps it’s the relative anonymity of painters that attracts Dylan. The cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer once said that the painter Pat Steir wanted to disappear from her work: Steir disagreed with Lotringer, but Dylan wouldn’t. Lockdown might have been an ideal time to vanish entirely, but his status as a performer leaves Dylan in a double bind.

Many of the lyrics here are changed, as one has come to expect, as though Dylan can’t let them go until they sit just right for him, goalposts that move with age. However, it is a mistake to compare these new versions only to their original iterations, canonical to his fans, mere blueprints for the songwriter. Previously, such lyrical adaptations were reported only by Bobcats on the road, photocopied in fanzines; now they are recorded by Dylan himself, a development that began with Mondo Scripto, a 2018 exhibition for which Dylan handwrote sixty lyrics of his most famous songs, often including adjustments that he has recently preferred in concert. This process generally involves a turn away from the high-flown or inexplicable (to us, and perhaps at this remove, to him) towards the specific, the tangible, and occasionally the banal: the couplet “Got to hurry back to my hotel room / Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece” now ends “Gonna wash my clothes, scrape off all of the grease”. No one ever made great claims for the generic lyrics of “To Be Alone With You”, but now the words take a dark left swerve typical of Dylan’s late style into hardboiled narrative (“Did I kill somebody? Did I escape the law?”) and, further, the eye-for-an-eye world of revenge (“I’ll hound you to death / That’s what I’ll do”).

From the title card on, the keen viewer has been alerted to the fact that everyone is miming, as the film opens with a familiarly plaintive harmonica on the soundtrack, an instrument no one on stage is sucking or blowing. And in front of this miming band is Dylan himself, giving the fake performance of a lifetime, caressing the mic stand, clenching his fists with his sincere urge to communicate, grabbing both lapels, pointing to the audience (“you”) and jabbing his finger to his heart (“me”). Unusually, Dylan is hatless and, if you squint through the shadows and the waitresses taking a tray of mocktails across your sightline, you can almost imagine it’s fifty years ago, as his halo of wild mercury hair glints in the lights (and perhaps critics don’t discuss often enough the impressive durability of his tousled locks).

The music itself – which Dylan here presents with the “here’s one I made earlier” flourish of a Blue Peter presenter – has been beautifully pre-recorded, and this is where the film really scores. It is impossible to imagine Dylan singing, or interpreting, these songs better: phlegm never ruined anyone’s delivery, let alone his. Perhaps it’s the enforced breather from live performance; perhaps it’s the fact that these are studio versions, when we are used to hearing him project to larger rooms; or perhaps it’s the lack of drums (leaving the slap of the double bass as percussion) that makes the music timeless in more ways than one – nothing dates like a snare sound. The intimacy allows Dylan to experiment with his full range from tempting whisper to arrogant sneer, and the sensitive arrangements make one pay increased attention to the choice of material: these weren’t the first songs that came to mind because they were easy to remember. They weren’t in the set list last night. They’re there for a reason.

“Forever Young” is stately, straightforward, a moving wish from an old man. “Queen Jane Approximately” becomes more plainly self-analytical as Dylan casts his eye over the hangers-on of 1965 – flower ladies, clowns, advisers, bandits, even family – and offers himself the possibility of consolation and escape; “The Wicked Messenger”, here refurbished with a new lick, also reads as autobiography: “If you can’t bring good news / Then don’t bring any”. Then there are the themes that run through even this slim slice of the catalogue: of forgiveness and betrayal (a cheek is turned here, kissed there). One of the songs is set at a stuffy party, another in a nightclub, and everywhere there are shadows: “Was there somebody looking / When you give me that kiss / Someone there in the shadows / Someone that I might have missed?”

The shadows are where Dylan wants to live, in chiaroscuro obscurity, chronicling the hearts of men. Perhaps this is ultimately what the Shadow Kingdom is, a place where, if one’s mouth is obscured by a large vintage microphone, one can lip-sync badly with impunity. Dylan has always been an atrocious mime, unsurprising for a performer dedicated to not looking back and reinventing songs in the moment. No, really, though: the Shadow Kingdom is America.

“Tombstone Blues”, played here at graveyard speed, offers a vertiginous snapshot of a world gone mad, where fact and fiction – Ma Rainey and Beethoven, Galileo and Delilah, Belle Star and Jack the Ripper – bleed into each other. Yet it ends with the songwriter’s most simple wish: “Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain / That could hold you dear lady from going insane / That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain / Of your useless and pointless knowledge”. And, after all, after everything, even the last eighteen months, his wish keeps coming true.

Wesley Stace’s new album, Late Style, is released in September. The opera Dido’s Ghost, which he wrote with the composer Errollyn Wallen, had its world premiere in June and is now at Edinburgh International Festival