‘Velvet Underground’ Documentary Review: Rough-Edged Rockers

[peekaboo]

Todd Haynes’s new film celebrates the New York band fronted by Lou Reed that had a small audience but a large impact.

 

Left to right, Moe Tucker, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed

Photo: Apple TV+

The growth of streaming platforms has brought an enormous surge in documentary filmmaking, with a larger audience than ever before. “The Velvet Underground,” the new film from director Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Dark Waters”) about the iconic New York band fronted by Lou Reed—which opens Friday at theaters and will also stream on Apple TV+—stands out in this crowded field. It does the things most music documentaries do, detailing the group’s rise and fall with a mix of photographs, film clips, and commentary culled from recent interviews, including conversations with surviving members John Cale and Maureen Tucker. But it does so much more. “The Velvet Underground” is a beautifully poetic meditation on the emotional and cultural power of rock and the allure of making a life in art. 

 

‘Velvet Underground’

Apple TV+ and theaters starting Oct. 15 

Even before he began work on this project, Mr. Haynes was a noted chronicler of rock and pop. In 1987, he made the cult classic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” a short that used Barbie dolls instead of actors. His 1998 movie “Velvet Goldmine” fictionalized aspects of David Bowie’s rise and was set in the glam-rock milieu of the early 1970s, and his 2007 film “I’m Not There” found multiple actors, including Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale, portraying scenes based on Bob Dylan’s life. 

Compared with those knotty semi-fictional stories, “The Velvet Underground” is straightforward in perspective and construction. It starts at the beginning, with details from the childhoods of Reed, growing up on New York’s Long Island, and Mr. Cale, in Wales, and ends when the original incarnation of the band does—in late 1970, when Reed walked away just as it was about to release its final album with him at the helm, “Loaded.” But Mr. Haynes puts his own stamp on the material, using the film to tell the story of the frenetic and groundbreaking world of the New York avant-garde in the 1960s, especially in the worlds of experimental film and music. 

The usual story of the Velvet Underground is told in terms of its place in music and its ultimate rejection by the record industry. During the age of flower power and ascendant hippie culture, VU’s members wore black and sang songs about hard drugs and seedy sexual encounters. Though the Velvet Underground was championed by Andy Warhol during the height of his influence, its record label ignored the group and its audience remained small. Mr. Haynes touches on all of this history but spends much more time celebrating the band’s greatness. 

Left to right, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and Moe Tucker.

Photo: Apple TV+

We’re almost halfway through the film before the group has started recordings its first album, 1967’s “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” cut with the titular German singer who had become a regular at Warhol’s hangout, The Factory. Mr. Haynes takes his time establishing the parameters of the post-World War II downtown art world, emphasizing the avant-garde film created by those in and out of Warhol’s orbit and using split-screen to convey the era. 

Often, one of Warhol’s “screen tests”—three-minute films featuring a near-motionless subject staring at the camera—is juxtaposed with an audio-only archival interview with the subject, while another part of the screen might have quick-cut snapshots from street life in SoHo or the Lower East Side or clips from abstract animations. The collage approach allows the director to pack more information and context into the film’s two-hour runtime than would otherwise be available, and also carries the excitement of sensory overload experienced when one is young and immersed in a new and exciting kind of creativity. Filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas championed many of the artists whose work appears here, and he speaks in some of his final interviews before his death in 2019. 

Mr. Haynes worked with one severe limitation imposed by history and another he imposed on himself. There is very little live footage of the Velvet Underground, and what exists has poor sound. So he had to reconstruct what the band might have been like on stage through the editing of existing material—much of it shot by Warhol—along with still photos and recordings of concerts with varying degrees of fidelity. And he chose to conduct filmed interviews only with people who were actually there. Stories are framed in terms of what they meant in the moment. This makes the narrative seem as if it’s unfolding in the present tense. Singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who would later front the Modern Lovers before embarking on a career as a solo artist, offers an earnest and endearing account of seeing VU in Boston when he was a teenager. He claims to have attended “60 or 70” shows and says that the band completely changed his life. The thrill of the period is clearly still alive inside him.

As with any documentary about a subject this big, what’s left out is as important as what Mr. Haynes includes. For the director, the band’s prime years came with its first two albums, after which Reed fired Warhol as the group’s producer and ousted Mr. Cale. Comparatively little time is spent on the 1969 LP “The Velvet Underground” and 1970’s “Loaded,” both made with Mr. Cale’s replacement, Doug Yule, who appears in voiceover but not in an on-camera interview. 

The most profound absence from the film regards Reed, who died in 2013. While his voice is heard throughout via archival interviews, his comments tend to be terse and clipped. Reed was known as a prickly profile subject, and he wasn’t prone to reflecting on the Velvet Underground at length. 

Which makes Reed’s appearance at the end of the film even more striking. We see him speak on camera for the first time in a brief clip from the 1970s, talking casually to Warhol about catching up with his former bandmates. And then “The Velvet Underground” concludes with an acoustic version of VU’s “Heroin” recorded in 1972, during a concert for French television with Reed, Mr. Cale and Nico. We’re finally seeing Velvet Underground songs performed by their creators in high-quality, and then the credits roll. The immediacy of the group’s brief life gives way to the towering legacy it left behind, to which Mr. Haynes’s documentary now counts as a substantial contribution.