The Velvet Underground (2021 film)

Plot

The film opens not with a band but with a city. New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s appears as a primordial soup of underground film, drone music, and poetry readings: La Monte Young's sustained tones, Jonas Mekas's Film-Makers' Cooperative, Jack Smith, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and the Factory crowd. Haynes' thesis is stated early and dramatized throughout: the Velvet Underground did not come out of Elvis or the British Invasion, they came out of this scene, and their music only makes sense as its continuation.

Into this world walk the two founders. Lou Reed, seen and heard through archival interviews, is a middle-class Jewish kid from Long Island shaped by doo-wop, war fiction, and a grim stretch of psychiatric treatment, who wants to be a rock star and writes songs about the people nobody else writes songs about. John Cale, interviewed at length and the film's living anchor alongside drummer Maureen Tucker, is a classically trained Welsh violist who arrived in New York to study with the avant-garde and discovered he could make a viola sound like a building falling down. When they meet, the collision produces the band: Reed's street-level songwriting bolted onto Cale's drones and extremity, with Sterling Morrison on guitar and Moe Tucker, who taught herself to play standing up, on drums. Asked about the hippie culture surrounding them, Tucker dismisses it in one line: "We hated that. Get real."

Then Andy Warhol enters, and the film's warm middle section begins. Warhol installs the band at the Factory, adds the German singer Nico to the lineup over the band's objections, and produces their debut. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the multimedia happenings the Velvets fronted in 1966, are recreated through overlapping projections, strobing archival footage, and split screens, so the viewer experiences the shows the way audiences did: as sensory overload with a rock band inside it. The 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico, with Warhol's banana on the cover, gets its due as the film's centerpiece, with "Heroin," "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Venus in Furs," and "All Tomorrow's Parties" given room, and Nico alternating lead vocals with Reed.

Haynes also stages a thought experiment most music docs never attempt: what Reed's songs would have sounded like without Cale. A piano version of "Heroin" and an early, Everly Brothers-style take on "I'm Waiting for the Man" play in full, and the difference is the film's argument in miniature. Without the avant-garde, Reed was a very good songwriter. With Cale, he was something no one had heard before.¹²

Jonathan Richman, then a teenage devotee, describes watching the band hypnotize a chattering nightclub audience into total silence, and Haynes mutes the soundtrack while Richman counts off the seconds. The sequence is the film in one scene: not a performance clip, since almost none survives, but testimony, staged with a held breath. Richman marvels that the Velvet Underground "had hypnotized them one more time," still awed decades later, and the silence he counts becomes the film's proof of what the music actually did to people.¹³

The turn comes with the break from Warhol and Nico's departure, and then with the film's real tragedy: Reed firing Cale after two albums. The Reed-Cale partnership is treated as the band's love story and its undoing, wrecked by ego and temperament after White Light/White Heat. The Doug Yule era that follows is covered fairly but briskly, treated as the work of "a regular rock-and-roll band," and the band's dissolution and Reed's solo career arrive as a coda rather than a death march. Reed's death in 2013 is acknowledged, not exploited.

The film ends in elegy, with capsule biographies of the band's orbit, living and dead, and with the answer to its central paradox: the Velvets sold almost nothing and changed everything, and every loud, dark, and honest record that followed runs a line back to the small band with the banana on the cover.

Characters

Lou Reed (archival) is the band's songwriter and engine, a tender and vicious lyricist from Long Island whose psychiatric treatment, street poetry, and hunger to be a star all feed the music; he appears only through old interviews and recordings, which the film uses candidly, including an anecdote of him smashing his fist into a pane of glass rather than perform.¹⁴ John Cale (himself) is the classically trained Welsh violist whose drones and taste for extremity gave the band its sound, and whose firing by Reed is the film's emotional low point; he sums up the band's ethos as "how to be elegant and how to be brutal."¹⁵ Maureen Tucker (herself), the self-taught drummer, is the film's other living anchor, dry and unimpressed by the era's mythology. Andy Warhol (archival) is both patron and problem, the man who bought the band a record deal and an audience while turning them into an exhibit in his own happening. Nico (archival), the German singer Warhol installed in the lineup, sings alternating leads on the debut before being pushed out.

Interpretations and controversies

The film's main critical controversy is one of omission. Several critics, most forcefully Variety's, argue that Haynes underplays the post-Cale years: the 1969 album The Velvet Underground, made with Doug Yule, is for that reviewer the group's greatest record, "a masterpiece of religious street passion," and the film kind of brushes by it.¹⁶ The Atlantic makes the same complaint, noting that the two Yule albums contain many classic tracks.¹⁷ Roger Ebert's review also warns that the film is not a primer, and viewers expecting a straightforward history of Reed, Cale, Tucker, Nico, and the Factory may find its formal play disorienting.¹⁸

Sequels, prequels, and universe

None. The film stands alone, though it received a Criterion Collection release, a marker of its standing.¹⁹