The Velvet Underground
Apple TV+Where one artist fails, another can learn and succeed. The Velvet Underground and the eponymous, historically-laden band at the centre of this documentary piece from Todd Haynes explores that well. That opportunity to reach for the stars and the doomed outcomes that soon cemented them as living, breathing lessons of love and hate in the music industry. Their inspiration is unstoppable, and capturing that and who they pushed into creativity is a hard task. Joy Division, Nirvana, Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Brian Eno, all little flutters of the music industry that have The Velvet Underground to thank. But what do audiences have Haynes to thank for? The Velvet Underground is the idolisation process, churned out as a particularly rose-tinted spectacle.
To deny the influence of Lou Reed and company would be a futile endeavour, but disagreeing with their music is another issue entirely. It is an issue Haynes does not touch. He dares not poke the bear. That culture beast that dares to drag the naysayers down. A universal love for The Velvet Underground must be defined and redefined throughout. There is no patch of badness, and the bad moments are mere creative differences an audience in the current era can lap up as pre-post-punk. Nonsense. To buy into that, and by extension, The Velvet Underground, is to buy into a narrative of degeneracy and Nico-aided albums. Those are the moments Haynes refuses to comment on, the darker periods of actual degeneracy.
But to capture that degeneracy is a grand task, and Haynes does a fine job. Burnouts, breakups and accompaniments of drink, drugs and sex. The rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle embellished evermore. The Velvet Underground is guilty of embellishing the lives of this band, but it is at least an entertaining one. Overstretching the influence these men had, the trade-off is a plentiful helping of self-interested cuts of archival footage, with the bands music playing over the top of it. Its editing is similar to Keifer Sutherland-starring 24. That is worth the while. Fans of the band will benefit from the fact-checking on display, and dissenters of their musicianship will find it, at the very least, interesting to learn more about the band they either don’t get or don’t enjoy. There is something there for everyone, but it borders on licking the boot of pioneering musicians. Any sense of balance is lost, because the nostalgia is turned up to 11.
Starstruck fangirling meets solid research in The Velvet Underground, a documentary set on profiling a truly influential band. Love them or loathe them, they were pioneers of the genre. Whether that is due to the longevity of their work or the lack of competition is anyone’s guess. Anyone but Haynes, whose work on The Velvet Underground tries to straddle the line between persistent, rabid fan talk and genuine Bonafide journalistic instinct. Neither comes through with particular strength nor do they impact the documentary in a way that will make it a must-see piece of perfection or a nonsense piece that flirts with fiction. It is what it is, and what it is, is a formidably well-researched documentary that teeters too often into blowing up the ego of the creatives at the heart of it all.