John Wilson’s Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made Of
The documentarian’s brilliant new film “The History of Concrete” is actually about life as a working artist in NYC.
The appeal of documentarian John Wilson’s work lies in the element of quiet surprise. You strap in for one thing—like tips on tracking packages, as seen in the finale of his HBO series How To With John Wilson—and you end up at a cryogenic freezing plant, meditating on the impermanence of life itself. Through Wilson’s bleak humor, existential eye, and genuine curiosity, he’s able to tackle topics that might otherwise seem boring, especially ones involving the countless infrastructure flaws within his native New York City. (His work, in turn, has inspired the city to consider various fixes, from tackling the scaffolding problem to adding more public bathrooms.) “I think it’s important to treat really mundane things as if they are these important pieces of work,” Wilson said last year in a MoMA interview. If history is defined by the victors, then Wilson’s filmmaking presents a version grounded in the regular-degulars.
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The same cycle repeats in Wilson’s new feature-length documentary, The History of Concrete: I went in expecting urban-planning nerdery and gentrification talk, and many detours later, I walked away feeling weirdly inspired and connected to an aging dive-bar musician and liquor sales rep named Jack Macco. The older I get, the more I’m drawn to characters that, in my younger days, I might have mistaken for hopeless failures. I know now that pursuing art for art’s sake is never a waste of time, even if your band’s called Nebulus and you’ve been on the local scene for years. You can’t be a failure if you never quit. Such is the beauty of Wilson’s work.
(Spoiler alert.) While the foundation of the film deals with building materials (and you do learn about that—I now know the difference between cement and concrete), Wilson’s movie is also a look at his own struggles with selling a banal-sounding documentary to studio execs based almost exclusively on his track record and distinct style. This leads to some pretty unhelpful advice, like suggestions to center his doc on a famous musician, or his own self-imposed enrollment in a “How to Write a Hallmark Movie” class. Wilson makes a passing reference to DMX’s unreleased Christmas album, which the rapper was slated to record before his death in 2021, and other commercially craven entertainment industry practices. Like so many episodes of How To, this absurd little detail comes back around in the end.
Wilson doesn’t know any famous musicians. “You used to go see shows at non-commercial venues because that’s just the kind of guy you are,” he says in a voiceover as shots of former DIY spaces in the boroughs flash on screen. These spaces were temporary by nature, he explains, and the landlords were free to boot tenants once developers showed interest. So now Wilson’s musician friends and ex-roommates perform in narrow living rooms, sweltering basements, and backyards, at least until neighbors’ complaints stack up. These nameless freaks play wordless experimental noise rock, so naturally the film’s financiers weren’t thrilled.
Wilson meets Jack Macco by chance at a liquor store, and noticing his look, asks if he plays music. (Wilson eventually spends a year and a half recording this guy.) Macco initially describes his sound as a combination of prog rock, heavy metal, pop, and darkwave. He admonishes viral-famous musicians whose inexperience shows when they perform live. Tellingly, his idea of that kind of success is getting “half a million clicks.” In an attempt to gain momentum regionally, Jack switches up his collaborators, takes on vocal duties, and commits his hair-metal songs to tape. His biggest wins in the film are sandwiching originals among covers of “Seven Nation Army” at a bar where hardly anyone is paying attention, and eventually playing the Montauk Music Festival out on Long Island.
At first colorful folks like Macco seem like pure comic relief, but Wilson’s nonjudgemental style of interaction quickly cuts through any irony and often hits at something painfully earnest. Upon learning that Wilson was heavily involved in college a-cappella, with a classic rock-covering group called the Binghamton Crosbys, I came away with a new glimpse into his approach. Basically, if everything is embarrassing, then nothing is embarrassing. He’s telling a story about artistic perseverance through Jack’s small-fry rock-star quest, mirrored by his own struggles to make the film. Wilson sits in empty Zoom meetings, “worrying that stubbornly pursuing this project has permanently disfigured [his] professional and personal life.” But Jack doesn’t worry about such things. In a way, Wilson seems to admire him.
Towards the end of the film, before a gig at an Irish bar in Astoria, Macco calmly tells Wilson that his fiancée—of whom he’s never spoken—has just died of mysterious causes. He shows up to his scheduled gig anyway. She was, it turns out, an incredible person: Dorothy Chin Brandt, the first Asian-American judge in New York City. They were together 15 years, coupling up after Jack read her tarot cards. “She was always behind me, seeing things in me that I didn’t even see in myself, or wanna see,” he says. When asked what her most famous case was, Macco references a 2005 incident where DMX pretended to be a federal agent after crashing his car at JFK. “He went to jail because of her,” he tells Wilson.
Jack Macco’s ability to just keep going, despite personal loss and mediocre talent, is really what New York is all about. People continue to dream and create in the most expensive city in America because, well, what else are they going to do? As for Wilson, he’s living the actual dream and worrying through every second of it. Maybe one of these days he’ll let loose at a Nebulus show, which could see a boost in attendance thanks to his film. Crowded or not, Jack’s going to do his thing.
Nebulus plays The Cutting Room in Manhattan on December 30, 2026. “The History of Concrete” continues to open in theaters nationwide through November.
