The History of Concrete review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 09.26.26
★★★½ 3.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
John Wilson turns a curiosity about New York’s concrete into another meandering odyssey, using the premise as a springboard to wander, meet oddballs, and follow tangents until they become the point. The running gag about needing to shoehorn in a major musical act is inspired, and his fixation on frontman Jack Macco slyly morphs the film into a droll mini-portrait of an artist. It’s funny, occasionally enlightening, and very much in Wilson’s singular, discursive lane. It also overstays its welcome—there’s a false finish before an extra 40 minutes—but the shaggy charm still makes it worth seeing, especially for How To fans.
Full review — contains spoilers
The History of Concrete is basically what happens when John Wilson finishes How To with John Wilson, apparently has no idea what his next project should be, and decides that concrete is as good an excuse as anything to start walking around with a camera again. If you liked his HBO show, that probably already tells you whether this movie is for you.
It starts with him looking at the concrete around New York and trying to learn about it, but that mostly becomes an excuse for him to wander around with a camera, meet strange and interesting people and go down whatever rabbit hole happens to appear in front of him.
It’s extremely discursive and digressive, which is basically John Wilson’s entire thing. The movie is about concrete and also about absolutely nothing and somehow about everything.
One of the funniest running ideas is that he apparently had a financing requirement that the documentary include a significant musical act. So while he’s supposedly making a documentary about concrete, he keeps looking for musicians he can put into the movie to satisfy this requirement.
That eventually leads him to Jack Macco, the frontman for a band called Nebulus, who becomes a surprisingly large part of the movie. Wilson starts following this guy around and suddenly you’re watching this strange little documentary about a musician and his life instead of concrete.
And that's really the movie. It just keeps wandering into people's lives.
I enjoyed it. It’s funny, occasionally enlightening and very much in the same weird little genre Wilson created with his HBO show.
My main problem is that it’s too long. Somewhere around two-thirds of the way through, I thought we had probably reached a perfectly good ending, and then there was basically another 40 minutes. There were stretches where I was ready for it to wrap up.
But overall I liked it. If you enjoy How To with John Wilson, you’re probably going to enjoy this too. It’s basically the Seinfeld of documentaries, a movie about nothing and everything at the same time. Definitely worth seeing.