Review: The stuff of buildings and bridges is grist for something deeper in 'The History of Concrete'

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Set us as preferred Across its three-season run on HBO, John Wilson’s funny, observant docuseries-cum-tutorial “How to With John Wilson” played like the urban travelogue a complex metropolis such as New York was meant to inspire.Wilson, an anxiously witty host, turned his adventures (covering furniture, mastering small talk, appreciating wine) into fraught mini-epics of connection, in which one’s laughter invariably betrayed a melancholic grace about our tenuous place in the big crazy world.You wouldn’t expect (or want) his movie-directing debut, “The History of Concrete,” to be any different and it isn’t, beautifully so.

A supersizing of the series format, it doesn’t significantly alter the rangy charm of Wilson’s video-captured eccentricities, a sturdy foundation.He was probably destined to find feature-length curiosity in the titular stuff of walkways and structures, the second-most used building material on Earth, since concrete is mundane, ubiquitous and, though seemingly impervious, susceptible to (wise)cracking.And yet this gray mixture, majestic when deployed by ancient Romans (there’s a brief trip to Rome that depletes his production budget) but ugly when dominating our daily stroll, is also a way for Wilson to address the mirage of permanence and quest for solidity that is modern life.

He feels these anxieties personally as an Emmy-nominated documentarian now without a show and looking for his next project.Wilson wonders if his particular termite art — treating street B-roll like a hidden archive of absurd humanity — has a place in the cutthroat film world of today.

Awards ‘I just try to make it as if no one else is watching,’ the filmmaker says of his unusual interview series.On one end of that storytelling commerce spectrum is what’s communicated in a class Wilson takes on how t...