‘THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE’ is 100% Just a Longer ‘How To With John Wilson’ Episode – For Better or Worse

Using lessons learned in a Hallmark writing seminar for striking WGA members, deadpan documentarian John Wilson employs his sixth sense for finding the strange stories underpinning normal everyday life to piece together a sprawling, occasionally unwieldy account of his trying to make a movie. In true layer-cake, deeply meta John Wilson fashion, the film quickly becomes about trying to make the very film we’re watching, including attempts to secure funding and the various stipulations that come attached with even a modest feature film budget. A prominent musical artist needs to appear, for one. And the movie, somehow, is supposed to be profitable, despite being about concrete.

Anyone familiar with Wilson’s fantastically freewheeling three-season HBO series How To with John Wilson knows how this usually works. Carefully constructed narration accompanies tongue-in-cheek, slice-of-life observational footage of city life Americana until some innocuous thesis catches on a random thread and unravels into something much, much stranger and entirely unpredictable. An episode about covering furniture somehow becomes about foreskin restoration. One on wine appreciation ends up inside a secret sex cult. A bird watching “How To” ends up with UFO enthusiasts and blowing up a car with Steven Soderbergh. So when Wilson announces that his movie is about the history of concrete, the expectation is that concrete will merely be the initial launching pad for some wildly tangential pivot that’ll have us collectively questioning our culture – and perhaps our own sanity.

The joke ends up being on us. Wilson, ever the piss-taking provocateur, actually becomes earnestly fascinated by concrete: its ubiquity in global construction, its crumbling presence throughout the city (NYC) he’s always filming, and the myriad structural and environmental threats it poses. Of course, getting there still involves plenty of bizarre detours,  the peculiar storytelling sensibility that makes his work so singular as pronounced here as it was on his series. He continues his tradition of unearthing some of America’s strangest subcultures – from competitive bricklaying at a concrete convention to a 3,100-mile Taoist endurance run around a neighborhood block that lasts nearly two months – following whatever weird tributary presents itself along the way to some kind of logic conclusion. 

The result feels like a deeply meta continuation of How To with John Wilson, a direct follow-up to that series that asks what someone is supposed to do with a unique skill set they’ve spent years perfecting. How do you take something as inherently anti-commercial as a John Wilson documentary and turn it into something with mass appeal? The answer is simple: you can’t. And The History of Concrete lives and dies by that fact.

At feature length, Wilson’s formula inevitably stretches but remains fundamentally the same. The History of Concrete often feels like an extra-long episode of How To, which is both its greatest selling point and its most obvious limitation. The series benefited from ruthless editing and the feeling that every single shot, interaction, and detourhad been whittled down to the funniest, strangest sequence of events. Here, some of those run longer and thinner without necessarily being more WTF. The movie is still plenty weird, but rarely reaches the outrageous heights of “how the fuck did he get in this room?” that defined the show at its peak. That said, it’s still a small miracle that John Wilson basically managed to piece together enough funding and material to basically continue doing exactly what he did across 18 episodes of idiosyncratic prestige TV.