After a four-year absence from theaters, Ang Lee will return this fall with a searing film about young American war heroes that may land him in the Oscar race. But the movie, billed as a cinematic leap forward because of the digitally radical way it was shot, has faced a major question.

Because few commercial theaters have projection systems that are technologically advanced enough, will anyone even be able to see “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” with all of Mr. Lee’s bells and whistles?

At the very least, New Yorkers will.

The New York Film Festival said on Monday that it would host the world premiere of Mr. Lee’s film on Oct. 14 in a theater — a relatively small one, with just 300 seats — rigged with projectors capable of playing the film in 3-D, 4K ultra-high-definition and at the extremely fast speed of 120 frames a second. No film has ever been shown publicly that way before, according to the festival and Sony Pictures, which will release “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” nationally on Nov. 11.

It may sound like techno-babble, but Mr. Lee’s blend of visual formats is a major departure for movie exhibition, particularly when it comes to the speed. Films have been presented almost exclusively at 24 frames a second since the 1920s. To a degree, that rate gives cinema its otherworldly quality — the blur when cameras pan from side to side, for instance.