Hey, New Orleans. The new John Wilson documentary The History of Concrete is currently playing at Canal Place, which is likely only exciting to you if you’re already a fan of John Wilson. Convincing the uninitiated to join you on a Friday night for a documentary about concrete would take a heroically persuasive sales pitch, but fans of the show How To with John Wilson already know to expect that this doc will hardly be about concrete at all. Yes, Wilson’s comedic HBO docuseries is surprisingly fixated on urban infrastructure, but each episode gradually proves to be more about the infinite variety of people who populate New York City than the building materials of the city itself. As Wilson’s first feature-length effort in this project, The History of Concrete is very much just an extended episode of How To. It starts off as a willfully naive, wandering exploration of the history & production of concrete, but it’s constantly on the hunt for one-of-a-kind interview subjects to profile along the way. Wilson edits & narrates his voyeuristic man-on-the-street journalism with the same wry, soft-spoken humor that he deploys on his television show, including all of your favorite well-timed vocal tics & throat clearings to liven up concrete’s otherwise absurdly dry history. You don’t have to already be a fan of the show to find the movie funny or poignant; every episode of How To is self-contained enough to work perfectly well on its own, this extended one included. You’re just unlikely to spend your precious free time after work going to see a documentary about concrete unless you already trust Wilson’s Muppet-like voice.
If you are already a fan of How To with John Wilson, you might be worried about how the show’s format could sustain a 100-min runtime, nearly five-times longer than the usual episode length. Thankfully, The History of Concrete does a lot of that worrying for you; it’s just as much about the outlandishness of its own production as it is about urban construction materials. Wilson confesses early in the runtime that a major reason he stopped making How To episodes back in 2023 is that the show depleted his personal archive of digicam footage from public life in NYC. At a loss on how to start fresh without forcing his slice-of-urban-life observations into being instead of finding them naturally, he seeks out more traditional methods of feature-length commercial moviemaking. He learns narrative structure by attending a screenwriting workshop on how to successfully write & pitch a Hallmark Christmas movie, a course that is offered as a life raft for filmmakers who are struggling with the lack of sellable work in the industry’s current production dip. On the documentary-specific end, he discusses in voiceover how the only sellable subgenre in the current market is the “rockumentary”: fluff piece profiles of famous musicians that populate the splash page on every streaming service. His application of these industry lessons to his own work are, as you’d expect, ironic. When Wilson seeks out musician subjects to arbitrarily profile in his concrete doc, he’s exclusively drawn to no-name noise artists that he runs across in the D.I.Y. punk venues he frequents socially. He does eventually stumble onto a How To-worthy interview subject who works a double life as a liquor sales rep and the lead-musician in a dive-bar cover band, but that lonely, lost man’s screen persona does not exactly scream star appeal. He does offer Wilson an emotional core for the film’s narrative that can be edited into the vague shape of a Hallmark Christmas movie, but Wilson’s constant Zoom meetings with potential financiers don’t successfully convey the commercial potential of the project.
While Wilson continuously struggles to sell The History of Concrete to potential buyers in the industry, he immediately makes the clearest pitch to his audience yet about what makes his filmmaking style so compelling in the first place: documentation of mundane modern living while most other media is obsessed with recreating the past. Part of documenting the absurdity of everyday public life in New York City means that Wilson regularly runs across other, more robustly funded film crews. He’s at odds with the professional film & television projects that cross over onto his turf, not just financially but also philosophically. So many movies that film in the neighborhoods he frequents make an art project out of dressing the city up to look like its past historical self, instead of setting stories in those spaces as they look now. That’s what’s so quietly radical about the How To television show; it accurately captures the daily experience of modern city life, of meeting an infinite number of kind souls and unimaginable weirdos on public sidewalks and public transit from one task to the next. I even see my own specific city life reflected on the screen in the rare episodes where he attends construction-material conventions in New Orleans, including one for concrete. It’s oddly validating to see that mundane modernity treated with such wide-eyed reverence from John Wilson the character and with such barely-contained amusement from John Wilson the filmmaker. That’s especially true in The History of Concrete‘s case, since it offered the rare opportunity to laugh & react to urban life’s absurdism with a full theatrical audience instead of alone in my living room. It reminded me of going to see Downton Abbey movies in theaters in that way; Molesley’s colossal fuckups serving dinner to royalty weren’t any funnier in the movies than they were on the television, but they got much bigger gasps & laughs from a crowd that was happy to celebrate their favorite show together with likeminded nerds.
The History of Concrete never closes the loop on how it secured its own funding. I suppose that’s a detail best left to its Wikipedia page. It does manage to incorporate preposterous, meaningless footage of big-name celebrities (names as incongruous as Kim Kardashian, DMX, Jacob Elordi, and Michael Imperioli), so maybe that helped. None of those stars have half the impact of Wilson’s more typical interview subjects, though, like the lonely liquor-ambassador musician or the guy whose Gum Busters business scrapes gum off concrete or the guy whose Dead Ink tattoo preservation business might hold the secret to where the real-life Chef Boyardee is buried. Then, there’s the actual concrete of the title, which overwhelms the film’s visual language with the cracked & patched grey infinity of urban landscapes. Sometimes, the documentary can be sincerely informative about concrete, especially when slipping behind the scenes of municipal infrastructure to interview city workers about the scarily short lifespan of the concrete buildings, bridges, and overpasses we use everyday. More often, it seeks out the absurd instances where we’ve intentionally become disconnected from the direct impact of concrete, like at speed-bricklaying competitions or at virtual-reality concrete pours inside convention center tech showcases. Mostly, it’s all just an excuse to walk around and observe the people who populate the concrete around us both as intimate interview subjects and as distanced bugs-in-a-jar specimens of modern urbanity. I don’t know how you sell that idea to an audience who’s not immediately interested, but apparently neither does John Wilson, and it’s a miracle he’s gotten this kind of work distributed to our televisions & movie theaters in the first place.
-Brandon Ledet
