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When most individuals take into consideration concrete, they consider the plain stuff: The colour grey. New York Metropolis. Why it’s usually a nasty thought to leap off tall buildings. When John Wilson thinks about concrete, the erstwhile star of HBO’s “The best way to With John Wilson” thinks about DMX, Hallmark films, Kim Kardashian, public diarrhea, a trailblazing Asian American choose, the world’s first 3D-printed Starbucks, and a 3,100-mile footrace that honors a lifeless Brooklyn cult chief.
What do these issues have in widespread? Presumably all the things! Possibly somewhat bit lower than that. However positively, positively not less than this: They’re all issues that John Wilson thinks about when he thinks about concrete. And that seems to be all of the connective tissue we have to respect the connection between them.
A sweetly Dantean scavenger who collages this damaged existence again collectively from an endlessly amusing library of first-person video snippets and unpredictable detours (his clips layered with a quizzical voiceover that warps their photographs into cheeky visible puns, and evokes the have an effect on of an alien kindergartner sending travelogues about life on Earth to its buddies again residence), Wilson is smart of the world by sanding the sides off its infinite strangeness. His work suggests a sleeping mind that’s straining to prepare chaos into order, and his skill to fabricate semi-logical associations between actually something — usually by forging a path that leads from A to B to Q to historic hieroglyphics to an Avatar fan help group earlier than ultimately discovering its method again to the place it started — has allowed him to impose some credible diploma of that means onto a human situation that gives all too little of its personal.
Very similar to the episodes of his present (very very like, to the purpose of being indistinguishable, other than its size), Wilson’s constantly hilarious and sneakily profound “The Historical past of Concrete” is sustained by an inner rigidity between order and entropy. Between that means and mayhem. This meandering however laser-focused essay movie is, like the very best episodes of Wilson’s present, sustained by parallel dramatic questions that inevitably reply one another by the top. (The sequence finale of “How To” is very related, as its seek for lasting function amid the transience of all issues completely tees up this debut function).
The primary is so simple as it will get: What’s Wilson going to do with himself now that his short-lived however deeply beloved premium cable TV sequence is over? (“The area between initiatives is difficult” he muses initially of the film earlier than slicing to an inordinately phallic signal of a scorching canine bisecting the 2 sides of an enormous bun). The second is extra sophisticated, although it’s mainly the primary query in disguise: How is Wilson going to chop all of the footage he’s been capturing ever since right into a coherent rationale that permits him to rescue a convincing sense of peace from his jobless uncertainty?
In fact, “The Historical past of Concrete” is Wilson’s subsequent undertaking, and the method of turning it into an precise job — which is to say, the method of getting it funded — is subsumed into the smorgasbord of fabric that he presents to us over the course of the film’s 100 minutes.
It will be a waste of time to stroll you thru how Wilson will get from 49-cent royalty checks and rueing his life as a Ridgewood landlord to the oldest buildings in Rome and a brick-laying contest in Las Vegas, however suffice it to say that concrete — everybody’s favourite composite materials composed of combination certain along with fluid cement — serves as the good connector. Wilson is compelled to the substance as a result of he acknowledges how effectively it straddles the divide between false permanence and ephemerality. Individuals make skyscrapers and highways out of it. They scratch their names into the combination earlier than it dries as a bid for immortality. They use it to construct the burial vaults that maintain them into the candy hereafter. It’s nothing lower than the spine of contemporary infrastructure.
And but, concrete solely lasts for about 40 years earlier than it begins to crumble. I’ve already held out for longer than that, and my physique is made out of mushy stucco and wiry grey hair. Even probably the most stable issues on Earth aren’t meant to final eternally. Towers crumble. Highways collapse. TV reveals come to an finish. And that’s OK! Effectively, that last item is.
And Wilson should perceive that at coronary heart, as he ended “How To” on his personal accord. However as anybody is aware of who’s ever misplaced — and even voluntarily relinquished — a foundational piece of themselves, to know loss is just not the identical as to settle for it. And “The Historical past of Concrete” is nothing if not a sprawlingly stunning self-portrait of a person attempting to strike a stability between letting go and holding on. A person attempting to create space for grief concurrently he scrambles for self-preservation.
The existential nervousness of that mission supplies “The Historical past of Concrete” a good deeper bedrock of wistfulness than might be discovered within the flooded basement of Wilson’s earlier work (amongst this film’s different miracles: It made me sympathetic in direction of a New York Metropolis landlord). Demise, evanescence, and the inevitability of change forged a protracted and fixed shadow over the movie, as Wilson’s consideration flits from the Sri Chinmoy ultramarathon and its promise of self-transcendence to Tibetan sand mandalas and a tattoo artist who preserves the inked flesh of the lifeless in order that the dwelling can body it on their partitions.
That context might be sufficient to understand among the movie’s most pleasant asides, comparable to a profile of the person behind GumBusters — a enterprise that energy blasts outdated gum off the streets of NYC — and a quick apart into the non permanent venues that host Wilson’s favourite DIY noise reveals. Different detours could be more durable to elucidate and far simpler to destroy, however anybody conversant in “How To” shall be unsurprised by how Wilson’s cock-eyed perspective permits him to be movingly sentimental with out ever veering into self-seriousness.
By the identical token, followers of his work shall be conversant in how “The Historical past of Concrete” seems askew at its hero characters with out ever trying down on them. And no hero character in any of Wilson’s earlier stuff performs a bigger position than part-time rock-and-roller Jack Macco, who Wilson meets when the man is handing out free tequila samples at a liquor retailer. Whereas Macco is an plain eccentric, and there’s one thing somewhat unhappy in regards to the empty bar gigs he performs alongside the Jersey shore (a unhappiness made that a lot stronger by his bandmates’ refusal to rehearse), he steadily involves embody the core fact on the coronary heart of Wilson’s work: There’s extra to everyone than meets the attention.
It isn’t lengthy earlier than Macco’s set checklist — a cautious negotiation between originals and covers — erupts into an existential dilemma over the push-and-pull between creation and inertia, which in flip results in a wildly surprising private revelation that confronts us with a universe of latest potentialities concurrently it deliver the movie again to its nucleus of grief. That circularity is a defining staple of how Wilson has at all times formed his imaginative and prescient of the world, and, maybe much more than the filmmaker’s signature aesthetic, is the factor about this film that may engender the sensation that he’s merely repeating himself with an extended working time.
I don’t assume Wilson would deny that. Quite the opposite, “The Historical past of Concrete” provides a characteristically roundabout argument for the rewards of sticking to a system (it entails a visit to the Canadian warehouse the place they shoot all of Hallmark’s Christmas films). A system imposes consolation upon chaos. That consolation will be manufactured, even inauthentic, however everybody must make their very own sense of this cruel world in the event that they need to take pleasure in dwelling in it.
For a sure demographic of wine-drunk ladies, a level of peace with their smallness within the universe will be discovered within the divine predictability of watching somebody transfer again to their lovable hometown for the vacations, save a home from a grinchy banker, and share a kiss with a ChatGPT-created hunk below the mistletoe. John Wilson finds the identical from stringing “random” issues collectively till life itself begins to resemble a wildly weird — and oddly soothing — proof board within the case he’s constructing towards meaninglessness.
Humanity has lengthy regarded the shortage of a grand design as an invite to create their very own, and also you don’t must imagine within the connections that Wilson makes in “The Historical past of Concrete” to understand how the act of constructing them retains the world from crumbling round him, and permits him to make his personal form of peace with the truth that it is going to some day. If possibly not for one more 40 years.
Grade: A-
“The Historical past of Concrete” premiered on the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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