The Vel­vet Under­ground – first-look review

With his films Vel­vet Gold­mine and I’m Not There, direc­tor Todd Haynes has a strong claim to the title of our great­est fea­ture film music crit­ic. They are both not-quite-biopics, and each takes a side­ways, yet point­ed per­spec­tive on the lega­cies of two gen­er­a­tion-defin­ing icons: David Bowie and Bob Dylan.

Vel­vet Gold­mine files the ser­i­al num­bers off the glam era, chang­ing names yet burn­ing bright­ly with fury at how its stars even­tu­al­ly aban­doned the Moon­age Day­dream. I’m Not There, mean­while, viewed Dylan through a kalei­do­scope, cast­ing six actors to reveal a shapeshifter often at odds with him­self and his art. Haynes’ lat­est is an excel­lent and expan­sive doc­u­men­tary – the director’s first – and is for once giv­en a straight­for­ward title that, on the face of it, appears to clear­ly pin­point its sub­ject: The Vel­vet Underground.

Per­haps the ulti­mate cult pop group, the Vel­vets com­bined rock ​‘n’ roll with avant-garde influ­ences to form a heady, dis­so­nant sound that was dis­tinct­ly their own, and com­plete­ly out of step with the flower-pow­er main­stream of the time. Pack­aged and pre­sent­ed to the world by pop-art mae­stro Andy Warhol as part of his Fac­to­ry empire, the band record­ed four albums in four years before effec­tive­ly split­ting in 1970. Their lead song­writer Lou Reed would rise to promi­nence as a solo act lat­er in the decade, while the band’s small body of work would even­tu­al­ly inspire many oth­er artists from David Bowie to Talk­ing Heads to Joy Divi­sion to The Strokes.

Inspi­ra­tion; break­through; com­mer­cial fail­ure; revival. The sto­ry of the Vel­vet Under­ground nat­u­ral­ly lends itself to a cra­dle-to-grave-to-res­ur­rec­tion nar­ra­tive, but Haynes fol­lows his own per­son­al path. For­mal­ly, there’s an edgy rejec­tion of the expect­ed mix­ture of talk­ing heads and archive footage (although, of course, there’s plen­ty of both in the mix). Haynes favours split-screens, frames with­in frames, and off-cen­tre com­po­si­tions to cre­ate com­pelling visu­al jux­ta­po­si­tions, the first being a compare/​contrast intro­duc­tion to the band’s two dri­ving cre­ative forces: song­writer-gui­tarist Reed and mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist John Cale.

We first see Cale in archive footage, wheeled out as a con­tes­tant on the game show I’ve Got a Secret – that secret being that he has just con­tributed to an 18 hour-long per­for­mance of Erik Satie’s marathon min­i­mal­ist piano work Vex­a­tions. A prodi­gy from a Welsh min­ing vil­lage, Cale couldn’t be fur­ther removed in back­ground from Reed, the Long Island-born son of an accoun­tant brought up on tele­vi­sion, doo wop and Bo Did­dley, who lat­er found work as a song­writer crank­ing out knock-off pop tunes for the bud­get label Pick­wick Records.

Cale and Reed’s paths cross in New York, at the epi­cen­tre of a bur­geon­ing art scene, and it’s here where Haynes diverges most from the pop-doc rule­book. Sure, there are the back­stage anec­dotes, the archive footage, the demo record­ings and sequences set to the elec­tri­fy­ing stu­dio ver­sions of ​‘Hero­in’, ​‘Venus in Furs’ and ​‘I’m Wait­ing For The Man’, but Haynes asserts that the Vel­vet Under­ground were a prod­uct of – and offer lis­ten­ers a gate­way into – a uni­verse of rad­i­cal art, from the film­mak­ing of Jonas Mekas and The Film-Mak­ers’ Coop­er­a­tive, to beat poet­ry, to Lam­ont Young and Tony Conrad’s exper­i­ments with drone music, to Andy Warhol’s pro­lif­ic mul­ti­me­dia out­put. The video archive mate­ri­als in this film, which include sev­er­al of Warhol’s entranc­ing liv­ing-por­trait ​‘Screen Tests’, are worth the price of admis­sion alone.

This might explain why Haynes’s inter­est wavers ever so slight­ly as it pro­gress­es through the band’s sto­ry, as first Warhol and then Cale are kicked to the curb and Reed pur­sues a more cohe­sive, com­mer­cial sound. The innocu­ous line in the open­ing verse of joy­ous pop-stom­per ​‘Sweet Jane’, ​“Me, I’m in a rock and roll band”, has nev­er sound­ed so sin­is­ter. Through­out, Reed retains a cer­tain mys­tique: he is described as ​‘gay adja­cent’, while it is also said that he lived a cer­tain life in order to mine those expe­ri­ences and encoun­ters for his lyrics, and that most of all, more than any­thing, he want­ed to be a rock star.

As with both Vel­vet Gold­mine and I’m Not There, Haynes finds an enthralling mid­dle ground between hero wor­ship and ambiva­lence. There’s no thrill, no intrigue in hagiog­ra­phy. It’s the music, and where it takes you, what it opens up for you, that’s the thing. Haynes under­stands this, and so it’s no acci­dent that he starts this uncon­ven­tion­al, yet rev­e­la­to­ry doc­u­men­tary about an uncon­ven­tion­al, yet rev­e­la­to­ry band with a quote from Baude­laire: ​“Music fath­oms the sky”.

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