Bless John Wilson, who will puncture his ego faster than anybody else could possibly get to it. Creator and star of How to With John Wilson, the COVID-era HBO docuseries, Wilson knows he’s not exactly a household name. So, early in his debut feature documentary, The History of Concrete, he helpfully summarizes his backstory via voiceover – including that he was once referred to as a “celeb” in a Jeopardy clue. Lest anybody think Wilson’s head has gotten too big, he makes sure to linger on the contestants’ blank stares. Some celeb.
No, Wilson is still a man of the people, and thank goodness for it – it’s the key to his offbeat charm. Wilson’s modus operandi is literally-street-level explorations of topics – How to Put Up Scaffolding, How to Find a Public Restroom, How to Clean Your Ears, to name a few of his Emmy-nominated show’s points of inquiry – via man-on-the-street interviews and fly-on-the-wall filming. These ranging explorations are undergirded by a dry, self-deprecating humor, evidenced onscreen and in Wilson’s second-person, offscreen narration. The aesthetic is ugly/beautiful. The effect is strangely stirring.
The History of Concrete functions more or less like a supersized version of the television show, foregrounding Wilson in his journey to understand concrete’s role in our lives. That journey sends him around his favorite spot for field study, the streets of New York, but also to Rome, to a Hallmark movie screenplay workshop, to a liquor store where he finds a barroom rocker navigating terrible grief, and to Queens for the annual Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, wherein runners circle the same block for 52 days straight.
The History of Concrete paints a compelling portrait of what a weird world we live in. Wilson seems uniquely open to weirdness – in part, I suspect, because he’s a bit of a weirdo himself. He finds the poetry in it. Whereas most of us brush past a million oddities a day, Wilson seems to stop and say, let’s investigate further. Sometimes it’s simply to add another distinctive and/or mundane image to his voluminous digital library, like a squirrel with a camera storing nuts for future use in his free-association-like assemblages. As in one example, when the Hallmark movie thread wends its way to a shot of an anonymous guy on a street corner rubbing his best girl’s butt and giving it a squeeze. Coarse, maybe, but there’s real feeling there. This is romance!
The discursiveness is the pleasure of the piece, but it also tests the limits of one’s patience. There was a museum-quality, miniaturist perfection to the television show’s half-hour format. The feature’s longer running time can lack urgency, a soft grasping for a conclusion. When the film does end, it doesn’t come with the walloping sensation of having arrived somewhere monumental. Then again – and declared intent (“the history of concrete”) aside – Wilson is mulling the big questions here. Eventually we arrive at the same corny but apt conclusion as those runners, doggedly rounding the block: It’s the journey, not the destination.
The History of Concrete
2026, NR, 101 min. Directed by John Wilson.
This article appears in October 2 • 2026.
