How to With John Wilson, a junk-drawer wonder of a show that ran for three Peak TV seasons on HBO, never actually set out to teach its viewers anything. The instructional promise of each episode was a bit, a starting point for discursive, funny, intermittently personal mini-essays that always started in Wilson’s beloved New York, but could and did make their way anywhere. Wilson, an unassuming 30-something Ridgewood resident who narrates his work in halting voice-over and never seems to be without a camera in his hand, would kick off an episode called “How to Clean Your Ears” by undergoing a wax removal that improved his hearing to a distracting degree and somehow end it in a West Virginia enclave in the shadow of a telescope that’s full of people who claim to be hypersensitive to electromagnetic fields. Mundane premises like “How to Watch Birds” or “How to Appreciate Wine” served as the framework for explorations of everything from documentary ethics to the nature of belonging.
Still, even by Wilson’s standards, the stated subject matter of The History of Concrete is the equivalent of strapping on a weighted vest before setting off to run a marathon — a test of whether the filmmaker’s deceptively meandering format can handle the driest possible topic. That’s not just a sense I got when watching Wilson’s first feature-length documentary, which just premiered at Sundance. It’s part of the text for what’s in some ways just a supersize installment of the series and in others an experiment in what happens when the approach that Wilson first developed in short-form videos is allowed to play out over 100 minutes. The result is scruffily endearing, though it teeters on the verge of collapse at times, as the pretense that what’s unfolding onscreen is all a serendipitous journey gets stretched to the breaking point. Wilson may affect a self-deprecating, fumbling persona, but he’s actually engaged in an incredibly involved act of storytelling that relies on wry montages of street footage, fragments of memoir, and multiple narratives that are Jenga’d together into something resembling a thematic whole.
