After How To with John Wilson ended in 2023, John Wilson was unmoored, out of a team and a budget, wandering the city with a camera. His first feature — about concrete, of all things — starts from that idleness and ends somewhere genuinely political. Richard Brody’s New Yorker review argues the film is richer than the series: real discovery rather than faux-magpie arrangement.

The material itself does a lot of work:

  • Second only to water, concrete is the most-used substance on earth — its importance lies in its ubiquity
  • Sam Schwartz (who coined “gridlock”) tours Wilson through the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Brooklyn Heights, where three levels of transit rest on concrete in a grievous state of deterioration; he has seen chunks fall and kill motorists
  • A Bronx public pool’s concrete is beyond repair — patch it badly or rebuild “from the structure up”
  • Cement production is the third-biggest contributor to global warming; the most popular booth at the Las Vegas concrete trade show sells 3D-printed concrete, i.e. fully robotic construction
  • China used as much sand between 2011 and 2014 as the United States used in the past century, with the ecological cost of pulling it out of the landscape
  • Dust from a Brooklyn concrete-recycling facility damaged local residents’ health until they forced it shut
  • Wilson films the City Council narrowly passing Eric Adams’s “City of Yes” housing program, then looks skeptically at the triumphalist ceremony that follows

That last sequence is the film’s politics in miniature. Wilson favors building affordable housing and still doubts the beneficiaries will be the people who most need it — the same suspicion Brody finds running under the whimsy. Concrete is, as Brody puts it, “remarkably, pointedly, urgently political,” because infrastructure is only perceived in its absence or its failure.

Wilson smuggles the argument inside entertainment. A financier demanded a prominent musician, so the film includes a local rock band — and finds the musician slipping his own songs into cover-band sets between the hits, which is roughly Wilson’s own method. His near-surrealism turns out to be “a realism of wonder”: absurdity accepted as self-contradiction rather than collapse. It takes a city to keep a house standing, a road passable, water flowing in or staying out — and a world to keep that city whole. That is a quietly collective way of seeing public things, and it is the opposite of a mastermind’s view.