When most people think about concrete, they think about the obvious stuff: The color gray. New York City. Why it’s generally a bad idea to jump off tall buildings. When John Wilson thinks about concrete, the erstwhile star of HBO’s “How to With John Wilson” thinks about DMX, Hallmark movies, Kim Kardashian, public diarrhea, a trailblazing Asian American judge, the world’s first 3D-printed Starbucks, and a 3,100-mile footrace that honors a dead Brooklyn cult leader.What do those things have in common? Possibly everything! Maybe a little bit less than that. But definitely, definitely at least this: They’re all things that John Wilson thinks about when he thinks about concrete. And that turns out to be all the connective tissue we need to appreciate the relationship between them.A sweetly Dantean scavenger who collages this broken existence back together from an endlessly amusing library of first-person video snippets and unpredictable detours (his clips layered with a quizzical voiceover that warps their images into cheeky visual puns, and evokes the affect of an alien kindergartner sending travelogues about life on Earth to its friends back home), Wilson makes sense of the world by sanding the edges off its infinite strangeness. His work suggests a sleeping brain that’s straining to organize chaos into order, and his ability to manufacture semi-logical associations between literally anything — often by forging a path that leads from A to B to Q to ancient hieroglyphics to an Avatar fan support group before eventually finding its way back to where it began — has allowed him to impose some credible degree of meaning onto a human condition that offers all too little of its own. Much like the episodes of his show (very much like, to the point of being indistinguishable, aside from its length), Wilson’s consistently hilarious and sneakily profound “The History of Concrete” is sustained by an internal tension between order and entropy. Between meaning and mayhem. This meandering but laser-focused essay film is, like the best episodes of Wilson’s show, sustained by parallel dramatic questions that inevitably answer each other by the end. (The series finale of “How To” is especially relevant, as its search for lasting purpose amid the transience of all things perfectly tees up this debut feature). The first is as simple as it gets: What is Wilson going to do with himself now that his short-lived but deeply beloved premium cable TV series is over? (“The space between projects is hard” he muses at the start of the movie before cutting to an inordinately phallic sign of a hot dog bisecting the two sides of a giant bun). The second is more complicated, even though it’s basically the first question in disguise: How is Wilson going to cut all the footage he’s been shooting ever since into a coherent rationale that allows him to rescue a convincing sense of peace from his jobless uncertainty?Of course, “The History of Concrete” is Wilson’s next project, and the process of turning it into an actual job — which is to say, the process of getting it funded — is subsumed into the smorgasbord of material that he presents to us over the course of the movie’s 100 minutes. ~this review continues on IndieWire~
