There are no contemporary music critics stating the obvious of the band’s continued relevance. It avoids the boring habits of most rock docs.
So when making a film about The Velvet Underground, a band that was so short lived and chameleon-like, the biggest challenge for a filmmaker is finding a way to tell the whole story without evaporating the mystery and the danger that lives on in the music.Ī large part of The Velvet Underground’s success lies in what it leaves out. Then came the more gentle acoustic songs and the eventual turn to radio-friendly pop before chief songwriter Lou Reed called it quits in 1970. (It only took The Beatles two years to go from performing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on Ed Sullivan to dropping acid and chanting verses inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead in “Tomorrow Never Knows.”) But the Velvets were writing songs about hard drugs and sadomasochism right out of the gate around 1965 and performing them as extended, droning, feedback-heavy jams well before the release of their 1967 debut record. Looking at their career today, it is just as challenging to answer the question Lester Bangs posed in his review of the band’s 1969 self-titled album: “How do you define a group… who moved from ‘Heroin’ to ‘Jesus’ in two short-years?” The 1960s were certainly an era of quick changes in culture. It is everything you could hope for in a film about a band that remains so mysterious half a century after their breakup.
Unlike most music documentaries and band-sanctioned biopics made these days, Todd Haynes’ brilliant exploration of the Velvet Underground is far more than a conventional biography.
Haynes’ first documentary creates a vivid and challenging portrait of a band that remains mysterious half a century after their breakup
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