Band members like percussionist Moe Tucker and Cale give lengthy interviews, as does singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman and Lou Reed’s sister, Merrill Reed-Weiner, to go alongside the footage. It uses snippets of archival footage and interviews to tell the story, leaning on blurry montages as storytelling devices - a go-to for Haynes. But before diving into the many characters that were part of the band and the art scene it arose from, the film details the early lives of singer-songwriter Lou Reed and Cale, dissecting their dissimilar musical influences and how their eventual pairing would give the Velvet Underground its singular sound that meshed avant-garde and rock styles into one. The film follows the trajectory of the band from its inception in the mid-1960s to its eventual dissolution late in the decade. His efforts amount to a captivating look at the Velvet Underground that leaves a lot of their legacy implied rather than spelled out.
Haynes - whose other ventures into the music world include the glam-rock tribute Velvet Goldmine, the experimental Bob Dylan portrait I’m Not There, and an upcoming film about Peggy Lee - sets out to demonstrate just how momentous this band was. “I knew that we had a way of doing something in rock ‘n’ roll that nobody else had done,” violist John Cale says. If VU were a polarizing force in their day, the band’s influence on music has been palpable ever since. Gradually, one panel becomes two and the images become more and more distorted, all in-time with the music’s increasing pace and increasingly uncertain lyrics. The laid-back opening strums of “Heroin” hum underneath images of gyrating hips and audience members. The screen flashes from a stop motion concert footage montage to a dimly lit basement, marked by mannequin legs hanging from a thread and the silhouette of a curvy vintage couch. Then, actress Mary Woronov’s jaw drops as she remembers the night that they came to Andy Warhol’s Factory in all black attire and performed “Heroin” early on in their career. “They had this off-putting aura, you know? Yikes, they were scary,” says Martha Morrison, guitarist Sterling Morrison’s wife, as she remembers one of their concerts at Cafe Bizarre for Todd Haynes’ new documentary, The Velvet Underground. When the Velvet Underground performed around New York in the 1960s, they weren’t the most popular band.
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