If you want to earn any money as a nonfiction filmmaker, direct a portrait of a boomer music icon. This is one of the lessons that John Wilson (HBO Max’s “How To With John Wilson”) learns and utterly fails to apply in his new documentary, The History of Concrete, which is about music, among many other things (concrete included). Wilson’s genre-bending film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is playing at Partizanfilm in Burlington and the Savoy Theater in Montpelier as of press time.
The deal
You (Wilson narrates the doc in second person) once helmed a successful cable show and were even described as a “celebrity” on “Jeopardy!” But now your show is over, your royalty checks are shrinking, and the long shadow of AI looms over your industry.
Seeking a new direction, you attend a workshop on how to write those perennially popular Hallmark movies. You watch a Hallmark movie in which the “holiday hunk” is an affordable-housing developer. Speaking of housing, you really need to fix the crack in the foundation of your New York City home so the basement stops flooding. You give it a try with some concrete mix from the Home Depot. Your savvier friend laughs at your pathetic effort.
And suddenly you’re thinking about concrete — where did it come from? Why is everything made of it? Why does it seem to be crumbling all around you? And that’s it; that’s your next movie. But how on Earth do you sell The History of Concrete to investors on a Zoom call?
Will you like it?
According to its logline, this documentary chronicles Wilson’s attempt to use the Hallmark formula to market the movie we’re watching. In reality, at no point in The History of Concrete do we see Wilson actually try to convince anyone that his movie is a heartwarming romantic affirmation, or even that it has a coherent dramatic arc. He’d be a bald-faced liar if he did, because The History of Concrete is a stream-of-consciousness ramble through seemingly disparate subjects, the opposite of a digestible formula. And it’s so entertaining that I couldn’t care less about the false advertising.
The Hallmark detour has a purpose, just not the one the logline suggests. Wilson posits that Hallmark movies represent our desire to live in an idealized past. By contrast, we associate concrete with relentless development and modernity. Yet, in reality, concrete dates back to ancient Rome — Wilson takes a jaunt to Italy to prove it — and it’s already part of American urban history, as evidenced by New York’s antiquated, decaying concrete structures.
Through his artfully collaged anecdotes, Wilson demonstrates that it’s easier to flee to Hallmark-style nostalgia than it is to face concrete realities (so to speak). Reporting from a concrete industry convention, he juxtaposes alarming talk of climate crisis and lunar colonization with a conga line and a World’s Best Bricklayer contest. Bit by bit, he gathers support for his thesis: “It seems like we spend more money re-creating the stuff we miss than trying to preserve what’s actually disappearing.”
With his herky-jerky delivery, New York accent and self-deprecating humor, Wilson isn’t your typical documentarian. But in The History of Concrete, he’s neither navel-gazing nor trying to persuade us that he’s a man of the people, Michael Moore-style. While Wilson uses candor to engage us, his personal story is ultimately just an entry point for a maze of curiosities. His meme-like sight gags (drawn from street footage) and bizarre tangents come at us so fast we never get bored.
For instance, a trip to see the nation’s oldest concrete street leads Wilson to a driving school where a woman describes her husband’s fatal accident. A patch of his tattooed skin hangs on her wall. Wilson visits the owner of the tattoo-preservation business — yet another way of clinging to the past.
Meanwhile, back in New York, Buddhist monks create and destroy a sand painting in a ritual designed to embrace transience. Day after day, chewing gum accumulates on concrete sidewalks, a visible record of passersby. A newly built concrete high-rise is already falling apart. Everywhere we look are decay and renewal, lofty ambitions brought low, and plucky opportunism.
Wilson may have sold The History of Concrete as a throwaway gag, but it evolves into a shaggy-dog quest for enlightenment. By the end, when he scores city council footage to the monks’ chanting, his humble subject has taken on weirdly vast dimensions.
Will you learn about concrete? Yes. Will you never take concrete for granted again? Also yes. Even as he reminds us that adventurous filmmaking is an endangered species, Wilson gives us reasons to fight for it.
If you like this, try…
“How To With John Wilson” (three seasons, 2020-2023; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime): Half tutorial and half memoir, the filmmaker’s comedy docuseries features him dishing out practical advice to folks on New York streets.
Unless Something Goes Terribly Wrong (2025; Thursday, October 22, 4:15 p.m., Film House, Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center in Burlington): The Vermont International Film Festival (see preview, page 49) is a great place to catch boundary-pushing documentaries. This “buddy comedy about poop” (in the words of the program guide) profiles another part of our dangerously aging infrastructure: a wastewater facility.
You Can See Everything (2026; currently scheduled to open locally on October 23): Speaking of unique documentaries, one of Wilson’s frequent collaborators, Nathan Fielder, brings us what sounds like a disturbingly intimate portrait of tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes as she prepares to do time.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The History of Concrete”
This article appears in October 14 • 2026.
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