The single most reliable trick in John Wilson’s arsenal is the bait-and-switch. You come for the ostensible subject, some drab or ordinary corner of daily life, and you leave having accidentally contemplated mortality, loneliness, and the whole strange business of being alive. His new film is titled The History of Concrete, which means the actual subject is almost certainly everything except concrete.
The Definitive Documentary About Not Being Able to Make It
The History of Concrete opens theatrically in New York on September 18 and Los Angeles on September 25, and it marks the feature directorial debut of John Wilson, the anxious, wandering New Yorker behind the beloved HBO series How To with John Wilson. With the show finished after three seasons, Wilson went looking for a bigger canvas and settled on the least promising material imaginable: concrete, the gray, ubiquitous, aggressively boring stuff that quite literally paves his city.
Then comes the gambit that makes the whole thing sing. Wilson attends a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, and decides to build his concrete documentary around that saccharine, commercially bulletproof formula, on the theory that it will make an unwatchable subject palatable. Naturally, the foundation cracks. What is billed as a documentary about a building material quietly becomes a documentary about the impossibility of making the film you actually want to make, a wry, self-lacerating parody of the nonfiction process itself and a real meditation on the tension between artistic freedom and the demands of the industry cutting the checks. It is, in the truest sense, a movie about nothing that turns out to be about everything. A running joke is that no sane financier would fund such a project and that Wilson himself is manifestly unqualified to direct it, and yet here it is.
The reception has already told the story. When it premiered at Sundance early this year, it walked out as one of the most acclaimed and most cheerfully indescribable titles of the festival, the kind of film critics reach for adjectives to pin down and mostly fail. Magnolia snapped up the rights, and now the wider world gets its turn.
The Herzog of the Sidewalk
What Wilson does that almost no one else can is find the cosmic hiding inside the banal. His method, honed across three seasons of television, is to start from an unremarkable premise and let it spiral outward through free association until the tangents accumulate into something unexpectedly profound. On the show, he narrated in a nervous, stammering second-person voice over an obsessive archive of New York street footage he had spent years quietly amassing, and the effect was of a man thinking out loud and stumbling, live, into wisdom. Here, thinking about concrete leads him to a 3,100-mile footrace that loops endlessly around a single block in Queens, to a seat at a Kardashian awards dinner directly across from Tim Robinson, to the world’s first 3D-printed Starbucks, and onto the set of one of the year’s buzziest films. None of it should connect. All of it somehow does, and by the end the gray stuff underfoot has become a lens for pondering permanence, legacy, and what any of us leave behind when the sidewalk outlasts us all.
This is the first-person essay-documentary tradition operating at full strength, the lineage of wandering, personal, camera-in-hand nonfiction that treats the filmmaker’s own confused curiosity as the organizing principle. Wilson happens to run it through a deadpan comic filter that makes the profundity sneak up on you. Scoring all of it is Suzanne Ciani, the pioneering electronic composer whose synthesizer work lends the mundane imagery an unexpectedly celestial shimmer, which is precisely the kind of high-low collision the film runs on.
An Indie Made by People Who Know the Grind
The pedigree behind the camera is worth noting, because it is not accidental that a film this self-aware about the film industry comes from this particular team. The History of Concrete is executive produced by Josh Safdie, Eli Bush, and Ronald Bronstein, the Uncut Gems brain trust who also shepherded Wilson’s HBO series, and whose entire body of work is steeped in the anxious, hustling, do-it-yourself energy of New York independent filmmaking. A movie about the compromises and indignities of getting a personal vision financed is exactly the sort of thing this crowd would understand in its bones. It is a theme we have chewed on before, when we looked at another scrappy indie about the long grind of clawing your way to your own feature, and it is one of the more honest subjects a filmmaker can tackle.
That honesty is the film’s secret weapon. Plenty of documentaries pretend the finished product sprang into being fully formed, hiding the money worries and the creative surrenders and the moments of pure doubt. Wilson does the opposite, turning the sausage-making into the sausage, and trusting that his audience is smart enough to find the panic funny and the doubt moving.
Worth Leaving the House For
The History of Concrete runs a brisk 102 minutes and is exactly the kind of singular, hard-to-categorize film that rewards seeing in an actual theater with an actual crowd, where the laughter builds on itself and the quiet gut-punch of the ending lands communally. It is not going to be the widest release of the fall, but for anyone who fell for Wilson’s particular blend of the ridiculous and the poignant on television, this is the reason to circle the calendar.
Go for the concrete, if you must. Stay for the accidental masterpiece hiding underneath it, poured, like everything Wilson makes, right into the cracks of the ordinary. Catch it in New York starting September 18 or Los Angeles on September 25.
