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.
‘The History of Concrete’John Wilson
It would be a waste of time to walk you through how Wilson gets from 49-cent royalty checks and rueing his life as a Ridgewood landlord to the oldest buildings in Rome and a brick-laying contest in Las Vegas, but suffice it to say that concrete — everyone’s favorite composite material composed of aggregate bound together with fluid cement — serves as the great connector. Wilson is compelled to the substance because he recognizes how well it straddles the divide between false permanence and ephemerality. People make skyscrapers and highways out of it. They scratch their names into the mixture before it dries as a bid for immortality. They use it to build the burial vaults that sustain them into the sweet hereafter. It is nothing less than the backbone of modern infrastructure.
And yet, concrete only lasts for about 40 years before it starts to crumble. I’ve already held out for longer than that, and my body is made out of mushy stucco and wiry gray hair. Even the most solid things on Earth aren’t meant to last forever. Towers crumble. Highways collapse. TV shows come to an end. And that’s OK! Well, that last thing is.
And Wilson must understand that at heart, as he ended “How To” on his own accord. But as anyone knows who’s ever lost — or even voluntarily relinquished — a foundational piece of themselves, to understand loss is not the same as to accept it. And “The History of Concrete” is nothing if not a sprawlingly beautiful self-portrait of a man trying to strike a balance between letting go and holding on. A man trying to make space for grief at the same time as he scrambles for self-preservation.
The existential anxiety of that mission provides “The History of Concrete” an even deeper bedrock of wistfulness than could be found in the flooded basement of Wilson’s previous work (among this movie’s other miracles: It made me sympathetic towards a New York City landlord). Death, evanescence, and the inevitability of change cast a long and constant shadow over the film, as Wilson’s attention flits from the Sri Chinmoy ultramarathon and its promise of self-transcendence to Tibetan sand mandalas and a tattoo artist who preserves the inked flesh of the dead so that the living can frame it on their walls.
That context is probably enough to appreciate some of the film’s most delightful asides, such as a profile of the man behind GumBusters — a business that power blasts old gum off the streets of NYC — and a brief aside into the temporary venues that host Wilson’s favorite DIY noise shows. Other detours would be harder to explain and much easier to ruin, but anyone familiar with “How To” will be unsurprised by how Wilson’s cock-eyed perspective allows him to be movingly sentimental without ever veering into self-seriousness.
By the same token, fans of his work will be familiar with how “The History of Concrete” looks askew at its hero characters without ever looking down on them. And no hero character in any of Wilson’s previous stuff plays a larger role than part-time rock-and-roller Jack Macco, who Wilson meets when the guy is handing out free tequila samples at a liquor store. While Macco is an undeniable eccentric, and there’s something a little sad about the empty bar gigs he plays along the Jersey shore (a sadness made that much stronger by his bandmates’ refusal to rehearse), he gradually comes to embody the core truth at the heart of Wilson’s work: There’s more to everybody than meets the eye.
It isn’t long before Macco’s set list — a careful negotiation between originals and covers — erupts into an existential dilemma over the push-and-pull between creation and inertia, which in turn leads to a wildly unexpected personal revelation that confronts us with a universe of new possibilities at the same time as it bring the film back to its nucleus of grief. That circularity is a defining staple of how Wilson has always shaped his vision of the world, and, perhaps even more than the filmmaker’s signature aesthetic, is the thing about this movie that might engender the feeling that he’s simply repeating himself with a longer running time.
I don’t think Wilson would deny that. On the contrary, “The History of Concrete” offers a characteristically roundabout argument for the rewards of sticking to a formula (it involves a trip to the Canadian warehouse where they shoot all of Hallmark’s Christmas movies). A formula imposes comfort upon chaos. That comfort can be manufactured, even inauthentic, but everyone needs to make their own sense of this merciless world if they want to enjoy living in it.
For a certain demographic of wine-drunk women, a degree of peace with their smallness in the universe can be found in the divine predictability of watching someone move back to their adorable hometown for the holidays, save a house from a grinchy banker, and share a kiss with a ChatGPT-created hunk under the mistletoe. John Wilson finds the same from stringing “random” things together until life itself begins to resemble a wildly bizarre — and oddly soothing — evidence board in the case he’s building against meaninglessness.
Humanity has long regarded the lack of a grand design as an invitation to create their own, and you don’t have to believe in the connections that Wilson makes in “The History of Concrete” to appreciate how the act of making them keeps the world from crumbling around him, and allows him to make his own kind of peace with the fact that it will some day. If maybe not for another 40 years.
Grade: A-
“The History of Concrete” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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