Haynes evokes the artistic hadron collider that was New York's multimedia '60s.
Instead, he plunges us into the Velvets and their world, using cleverly chosen black-and-white TV footage and flurries of split-screen images. He doesn't dwell on personal gossip, doesn't keep telling us that the Velvets were important and doesn't trot out young music stars to make the band seem relevant to the kids. No hagiographer, Haynes neatly sidesteps the usual rock doc banalities. Still, I like to think that Reed would have respected the integrity of Haynes, whose filmography boasts three daringly original music movies - "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," "Velvet Goldmine" and "I'm Not There," which cast six different actors as Bob Dylan. A trailblazing musician but known to be nasty as a rattlesnake - he notoriously disliked interviews, even walking off this very show. Oh, that probably wouldn't have been fun. Sadly, Haynes couldn't interview Reed, who died in 2013.
POWERS: In tracing the band's rise and fall, Haynes hears most from Cale, a vivid, appealing talker. They're about guys who are sick and dissatisfied with their lives. Or - I was interested in communicating to people who were on the outside.ĬALE: He said, why won't they - because people would complain about these songs being about advocating the use of drugs. And I was writing about things that hurt, and I was writing about reality as I knew it or friends of mine had known or things I had seen or heard. I said, what? And I said, what are the songs that you want? And he showed me these other songs. JOHN CALE: And Lou said, they won't let me record the songs I want to do. (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE VELVET UNDERGROUND") Here, Cale and later Reed talk about the kind of songs Reed wanted to record, songs that include "Heroin." He put them in dazzling multimedia shows, had them take on the icy Nordic beauty Nico as their dead-voice chanteuse and designed the famous banana peel cover of their still astonishing first album. Warhol became the Velvets' manager and made them The Factory's house band. Hearing their great infamous song "Heroin" startled even a hardened voyeur like Andy Warhol, who promptly showed his genius for folding other people's talents into his own brand. The Velvets' music was so unwholesome, it made the Rolling Stones seem about as satanic as The Monkees. Theirs was an invasive, often mysterious sound, with throbbing rhythms, slashing strings and Reed's flat voice singing of hooky, stinging lyrics that came steeped in the realities of prostitution, S&M and hard drugs. Once they added guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker - having a woman drummer was characteristically groundbreaking - they began creating music like no other. The two met in 1964 New York, and their sensibilities sparked.
At the Velvet's core were two brilliant outsiders - Lou Reed, a spiky, ambitious child of the Long Island suburbs, and John Cale, a viola-playing devotee of avant-garde music who escaped his dreary childhood in Welsh coal mining country. You see why in the new documentary, "The Velvet Underground." Made by exactly the right filmmaker, Todd Haynes, this inventive, immersive movie takes you to the heart of the band's radical black hole magic. Its songs still have the power to get under your skin. Half a century on, the band feels more relevantly alive than nearly all of its better-known contemporaries.
It took the passing years to make their reputation and prove their influence. In their day, the Velvets were largely arcane taste, without a single hit song. When I told him the Velvet Underground, he gave a derisive laugh. JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: A few days after I arrived in Los Angeles, an ultra-hip music critic at my newspaper asked me what '60s bands I liked growing up. Our critic at large, John Powers, says that Todd Haynes' film captures what made the group so momentous. GROSS: That's Lou Reed's song "Heroin" from the 1967 album "The Velvet Underground & Nico." There's a new documentary about the band called "The Velvet Underground," which is now showing in theaters and on Apple TV+. And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same when I'm rushing on my run, and I feel just like Jesus' son. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: (Singing) I don't know just where I'm going, but I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can, 'cause it makes me feel like I'm a man when I put a spike into my vein.