The documentarian John Wilson is best known for his HBO series “How To with John Wilson,” and in his first feature film, “The History of Concrete,” he makes clear to viewers the difference between cinema and TV. The movie unfolds the circumstances in which Wilson made it: after the HBO show ended, in 2023, he was feeling unmoored and depleted. In the film, he mocks whatever modicum of fleeting celebrity he’s achieved while recalling that, when the TV series was in progress, he had “a team of people, a big budget to do fun stuff that takes a lot of planning.” Now he was playing it by ear, wandering around with a video camera and recording urban oddities that caught his fancy.

As in the series, there’s an element of free association in Wilson’s method, as he flits from subject to subject on the basis of seemingly random connections that he draws out with montages of images and copious voice-over (often addressing himself in the second person). His approach to dealing with idleness is, he explains, to “put the instrument”—the camera—“in your hands.” The format of “The History of Concrete” is similar to that of his TV episodes, but the tone is different. I wasn’t enthusiastic about the show’s sense of faux-magpie messaging, how its ostensible spirit of curiosity always left elements lining up just so. The movie, by contrast, is rich in an authentic sense of discovery, not least because its titular subject, superficially banal, is also profoundly and strangely universal.

Wilson builds slowly to the topic at hand by way of his own commonplace problems. During his post-“How To” lull, he attends a Writers Guild class on how to make and sell a Hallmark movie, and he watches one such movie having to do with a real-estate developer. From there, he goes on Reddit, reads about NIMBYs, notes the rampant construction in New York City and the flotillas of cement trucks to match, and riffs on his own effort to patch cracks in the foundation of his home in Queens to prevent flooding. After that, he finally confronts the twofold subject of his film head on: What is concrete, and why in the world should he be making a film about it? For the first time, he’s facing a frustration that he never endured while making his TV series—namely, trying to raise money on his own in order to do his work. When he shops around the idea of a film about concrete, he faces skepticism from executives and prospective backers, who doubt whether the subject merits a feature.

Wilson’s chain of observations and anecdotes includes plenty of material that is eccentric or funny, yet little of it is there just for humor’s sake; through association and allusion, its significance is ultimately revealed. There’s the “Gumbuster,” a New York contractor specializing in steam-blasting chewing gum off sidewalks (for the record, he also has private-label wine for his customers); a thirty-one-hundred-mile race, sponsored by followers of the spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, that’s run for fifty-two days, eighteen hours a day, around a single block in Queens; the first concrete street in the United States, in Bellefontaine, Ohio, which is also home to a funeral director with a side gig removing tattoos—i.e., tattooed skin—from the dead, and preserving it. Throughout, however, Wilson keeps one big idea going, like a pedal point, which reflects back on his effort to create the work at hand. Whether he’s showing footage from a GQ dinner at the Chateau Marmont, where Kim Kardashian is an honoree; touring a Hallmark movie studio in Canada; filming a local rock band at gigs in Queens and on Long Island; or visiting the on-location shoot of “Marty Supreme” (whose director, Josh Safdie, and co-writer, Ronald Bronstein, are among Wilson’s executive producers), Wilson emphasizes the problem of what gets funded, what gets produced, what gets shown. Concrete represents something that’s not readily visible except in its effects, not often perceived except in its absence or failure—namely, infrastructure.

For all the self-deprecating whimsy of “The History of Concrete,” Wilson is doing some serious diagnostic and analytical work, in part by tipping his hand to show which methods he’s using and why. The rock band is featured in the film, for instance, because one potential financier required him to include a prominent musician. Wilson simultaneously hints at contempt for the financier’s demand and makes the best of it, finding a local rocker’s life and work to be of interest and discovering how that musician gets his own original material into gigs in a cover band—by slipping it in between the popular songs that his audience wants to hear. The same is true of Wilson’s own self-conscious process: his idiosyncratic humor distinguishes “The History of Concrete” from a traditional issue-oriented reportorial documentary, allowing him to smuggle ideas inside entertainment and—he hopes—bring the film greater attention.

Wilson’s contemplation of concrete opens with a fact so obvious as to be startling: second only to water, concrete is the most-often-used substance on earth. Its importance lies in its ubiquity—and, thus, in the extraordinary span of the physical world that depends on it to hold up. When it cracks (as in the foundation of Wilson’s house), floods result. When its composition changes (owing to shortages in cement, or to less-than-careful production), it becomes less durable. When it isn’t maintained, catastrophe looms.

The most consequential visit that Wilson makes is to a former New York City transportation commissioner, Sam Schwartz (identified in the film not by name but by the distinction of having coined the term “gridlock”). Schwartz takes the filmmaker on a chilling tour of a major roadway, a section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that traverses Brooklyn Heights, where three levels of transit are, in Schwartz’s view—and to the eye of Wilson’s camera—supported by concrete that’s in a grievous state of deterioration. (He cites the specific danger of a chunk of concrete falling and killing a motorist—something he’s seen happen.) Similarly, Wilson visits a Bronx public swimming pool and learns, from a technician employed there, that its concrete is so profoundly damaged that it’s beyond repair. The pool can either be scantly patched or completely rebuilt, “from the structure up.”

For Wilson, concrete turns out to be remarkably, pointedly, urgently political. He reminds viewers that concrete is made, in significant measure, of sand—and learns, from an environmental scientist, of the risks of removing sand from the natural landscape. (Noting the prodigious quantities of sand being used in the world at large, the scientist explains that China used as much of it between 2011 and 2014 as the United States has in the past century.) Wilson finds that, at one point, dust from a concrete-recycling center in Brooklyn affected the health of local residents, who demanded the facility be shut down. Above all, “The History of Concrete” looks, in effect, to the future of concrete by considering (with a wink back to that Hallmark movie) the politics of urban development. In an extraordinary sequence, Wilson records a New York City Council session in which the legislature narrowly approves the then Mayor Eric Adams’s “City of Yes” program to expedite housing construction. Though Wilson favors construction for the purpose of affordable housing, he also looks skeptically at the fulsomely triumphalist ceremony that follows the vote and expresses doubt that the beneficiaries of the new policy will be those in greatest need.

Wilson’s TV series featured many niche conferences and conventions, and, similarly, in the film, he visits an annual concrete trade show, in Las Vegas. It features such diversions as the “World’s Best Bricklayer” competition and a dance party called the Concrete Mixer, but Wilson finds that the technical side of concrete is as political, and as socially momentous, as its civic applications. Carbon emissions from cement production are, Wilson learns, “the third-biggest contributor to global warming,” and the most popular booth at the show is devoted to 3-D-printed concrete, a process that enables completely robotic construction. To get a sense of its implications, Wilson hires a cameraperson to film the first printed-concrete Starbucks, in Brownsville, Texas, and, with minimal commentary, expresses revulsion at what looks, in the footage, like stacked-up lines of gray toothpaste.

For all the earnest substance built into the arch absurdities of “The History of Concrete,” Wilson approaches his subject—and, indeed, the world—with aesthetic ardor. His images and observations proclaim a fervent attachment to idiosyncrasy, to its beauty and its meaning. Absurdity implies self-contradiction, the acceptance of seemingly impossible multiplicities. Wilson’s profuse bewilderments affirm the vastly consequential intersection of seemingly unrelated events, the overwhelming complexity of ordinary objects and events, and thus the heroism of making even mundane things work properly. His near-surrealism proves to be a realism of wonder—not a paranoid fear of butterfly effects but an art of togetherness, of progress achieved by seeking out others and embracing collaboration. It takes a city to keep a house standing, a road passable, water flowing in or staying out, and it takes a world to keep that city whole. Wilson’s teeming peculiarities explode the presumptions of putative masterminds who, alone, have all the answers. His giddy connections are as beautiful as they are humane. ♦