John Wilson's feature debut, The History of Concrete, opens on a man who has lost his structure. The HBO series that made him semi-famous is over, the royalty checks have shrunk to under a dollar, and a Writers Guild seminar on how to write a Hallmark movie offers the only formula anyone in the industry still trusts. Wilson decides to apply that formula to a documentary about the world's second most used substance. The joke is the premise. The film is about what happens when the joke stops protecting him: concrete and Hallmark both sell permanence, and neither can deliver it.
Wilson is the lead here in a way the series never required. His halting voiceover still does the connective work, but the camera turns on him more often, and what it finds is a working artist with no job, blurring the faces of agents on Zoom calls who cannot understand why anyone would fund this. He shows the pitch failing in real time. No deflection. Just a man buying the building he once rented and converting it into below-market apartments because that, at least, will stand. Michael Imperioli drifts through for a short exchange about filmmaking and cement; Nathan Fielder, Timothée Chalamet, and Josh Safdie appear uncredited, and the cameos play as texture rather than stunt. Wilson lets the famous people be as incidental as the man who pressure-washes gum off Manhattan sidewalks.
Wilson shot nearly all of the film himself, rebuilding an archive from nothing after HBO kept the old footage, and the images carry his signature: street signs that assemble into sentences, a rooster crossing a firehouse floor, jars of peanut butter that have not yet met a knife. Cinematographer Nellie Kluz contributes a handful of days, including the studies of gum patterns on pavement that become one of the film's best runs of observation. Editor Cori Wapnowska holds the other load-bearing credit. The cuts ferry the viewer from a Hallmark soundstage to a 3,100-mile race around a single block in Queens without announcing the turn, and a throwaway mention of a DMX Christmas album pays off an hour later in a way that feels like coincidence and is, by Wilson's own admission, pure construction. Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein executive produce, and their influence shows in the willingness to let a scene run past comfort.
What the film understands is that concrete is an adjective before it is a material. It means solid, something you can depend on. The substance itself cracks, floods, gets patched with mismatched pours Wilson calls rogue mounds, and hangs off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway held in place by steel mesh. Wilson lines this up against his own career and against the Hallmark rules (no interrupted kisses, no financial struggle, trauma must resolve into an arc) and refuses to grant either one the ending it promises. The film declines the redemption arc for its maker. It declines to pretend the city's infrastructure is fine. Even the Buddhist sand mandala sequence, which a lesser film would use as consolation, sits in the movie as plain fact: made with care, then swept away.
The structure has a cost. At 101 minutes, the digressions that gave the series its charge sometimes tip into drift, and the line between digressive and scattered gets crossed more than once. The Los Angeles section, with its observations about a city's pornographic relationship to pavement, plays as a lesser episode grafted on. But the looseness is also the argument. A film about impermanence that arrived in a tidy three-act shape would be lying about its subject.
Magnolia opened the film at IFC Center on September 18 to the biggest documentary debut in the theater's history, a fine irony for a movie that spends a third of its runtime failing to get financed. Wilson has made something durable out of a case against durability. The Hallmark instructor tells him audiences do not want to see people struggling with money. He shows the rent he charges his tenants, to the dollar. Permanence is the sales pitch. Cracks are the product.