After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, filmmaker John Wilson tries to use the same formula to sell a documentary about concrete. Documentarian and observational humor connoisseur John Wilson makes his feature directorial debut with a film that is effortlessly hysterical and genuinely hard to describe. The How to With John Wilson creator’s quick, permeating wit and boundless curiosity clock in, this time through the lenses of urbanism and, somehow, the institution of Hallmark. A heady comedic whiplash emerges as Wilson bounces between (literal) textures of the mundane. Underlying Wilson’s well-established, unique filmmaking language are both an intellectual specificity and a strangely leveling impulse — a fascination with the breadth of American life and the built environment that contains it. The History of Concrete rests on a pure, generative desire to give warmth to the invisibly ubiquitous, answering key questions such as: “Who removes the gum from our sidewalks?” This is an unassumingly strange, joyful documentary that no one else could have made, perfect for the chronically online, the studied philosopher, and everyone in between.