![]() Still, The Velvet Underground is a documentary, one being released by Apple, at that. ![]() It’s at this interval where Haynes’ flurry of imagery and sound is most suited to its subject, the excitement of the period palpably conveyed via the quickfire editing. The roots of The Velvet Underground are impossible without such venerated and varied figures as Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, La Monte Young, and more. Haynes’ montage splits the onscreen difference - often literally - between contemporaneous interviews and archival footage, hinting at the backlog of formalities that must be dispensed with: the crosscontinetal roots of the band (which features a brief foray into Welsh mining, courtesy of John Cale, and Long Island nuclear family life, as per Lou Reed’s sister), the state of avant-garde music at the time, and most intriguingly, the artistic hodgepodge of early ’60s New York City. ![]() The sheer wealth of visual and aural information plays as something of a course-correction for a group whose iconography is as shallowly oversaturated as Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Haynes’ new film, The Velvet Underground, which covers the rise of the wildly influential rock band, sacrifices the director’s appetite for free flowing histories, instead housing idiosyncrasies within the conventions of a standard documentary structure. I’m Not There and Velvet Goldmine both retained enough familiarity subsumed within the unique designs of their creator that the cultural significance of the respective, seismic musical moments was never far beyond the edges. Whereas a side-trip into documentary would be a pedestrian decision for innumerable other directors, it’s a surprising one for Haynes, given his fearless worldbuilding in films past. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician, tends to reconstruct rather than document, reincorporating tokens of his beloved ’60s and beyond into parallel narratives, as in his fractured Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (in which the musician’s name is never actually spoken), and the David Bowie-adjacent glam fantasy Velvet Goldmine. The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects.
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