Going into this documentary, one should know that Todd Haynes never does anything conventional. The Velvet Underground is a project he’s been gestating for some years now, and when the film was announced out of competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it immediately became our most anticipated film of the fest.
The documentary takes an in-depth, yet idiosyncratic look at the rise and fall of Lou Reed and the band, featuring interviews of the individuals that were closest to them, such as Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers, Jon Waters, and various members of the band who are still alive today. The result is a Citizen Kane-like frame narrative, where only the people closest to Reed give detail to what he was like, only giving moments of opportunity for him to speak for himself via archival footage.
Todd Haynes has found a way to flip the music documentary genre on its head. The Velvet Underground is just as psychedelic as the music is idiosyncratic. The entire documentary is shown in split screen, offering opposing views and constantly bleeding over into the next subject. The split screen then dissolves into more split screens within the frame, then again, until you have 16 heads on the screen all offering their views of the early days of the Underground, accompanied by a loud, engrossing, sonic soundscape that makes it necessary to be seen in a theater.
Despite being geared toward musicians and music geeks as its focus audience, the documentary could at times be a littler more coherent. It’s fragmented in that it doesn’t give the details of the speakers, who they are, and what their relationship was with the band; you’re expected to fill in those details yourself, making The Velvet Underground feel like it’s merely surface level. It lacks the emotional weight their music embodies. It’s heavy on the topic of improvisation, as if that was their claim to fame and what separated them from other contemporary artists, but it’s not the reason why audiences love the band so much. Maybe it’s the documentary Reed would have always wanted for the band, but it doesn’t function in the way for this writer to be drawn to it emotionally. But much like The Velvet Underground, it doesn’t oblige itself to be a crowd pleaser. Despite all this, it will be a hit for musicians, music aficionados, and historians.