Many of the best documentaries open us up to a new way of seeing. They might focus on a person whose life reveals an entire history to which we were ignorant; they might introduce us to an impossibly vast subject in intricate detail (the many documentaries of Werner Herzog, for example). There is really no end to the ways they can do so, and if we could predict them, the magic would be gone. But, certainly, one way a documentary, or any work of nonfiction, might achieve such an aim is to focus on something we might ignore, or even find boring outright, and reveal how rich it really is. Take concrete, for instance. Who is to say you couldn’t make a compelling film about that?

Richness and interest are not, however, what led filmmaker John Wilson to tackle it—it was a slump in work that followed the success of his TV show (How To with John Wilson) and the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. Some cracks in the concrete of the building where he lives led him to start examining the subject. Yet the documentary is only partly about the bedrock on which so many cities and buildings rest. It’s about his failure to get funding for this project, his reflections on Hallmark movies (he tries to use the Hallmark formula to pitch his documentary), the people he meets in periods of inactivity, some droll thematic musings, and, not insignificantly, himself. The narration, addressed in the second person, often concerns his feelings of frustration.

If the film fails, it is certainly not because concrete is a bland subject. The various ways it is mixed, the politics surrounding what kinds of it are used (white vs. gray concrete), not to mention the unexpectedly wild conventions for its makers—all of this should be enough fuel for a capable documentarian. It also isn’t, necessarily, because of its self-referential aspect, for it’s potentially thought-provoking that those with the power to produce films might shy away from a topic so seemingly banal. It’s that Wilson is remarkably lacking in self-awareness, and a barely suppressed anger at where he has found himself career-wise seems to animate everything he does.

Not that anger is a sentiment to which he gives much outward energy. Yet almost every person he interviews is mocked slightly, both in the ways they are shot, in his signature visual puns, and in Wilson’s deadpan voice-over. That he’s saddled himself with this project in the first place is only amusing if you’re willing to look down on a man whose job it is to remove gum from concrete or a group of earnest protesters singing a song to keep a park from being paved (among many others). Even when the film includes the frankly bizarre (a company that literally preserves the tattoos of the deceased, skin and all), it’s hard not to bemoan his wink-wink tendencies as a documentarian.

If you’re wondering how the above comes up, it’s not that there’s no reason for its inclusion. Concrete doesn’t last forever, so what do we try to preserve? That question becomes the connecting thread. However, Wilson can barely sustain a single line of inquiry. So even when he lands on some weighty issues (the politics of concrete in the construction of low-income housing), the film has been so snide and scattershot that none of it lands. He has remarkably little curiosity about himself as well: He describes it as a “loss” when he’s nominated for an Emmy but doesn’t win, and he needs to be told that maybe he should just be pouring himself into a project he’s passionate about, regardless of the reward.

The novelist George V. Higgins once said, “No one asked you to write. And no one will care if you stop.” To some, that might sound unnecessarily brutal, but it’s a fine reminder that one’s own passion is really the most important driving force. Novels, of course, do not demand the same set of resources that filmmakers need to make even the most low-budget film. Yet, by the end of this documentary, it’s hard not to feel that funding was the only thing that would have made Wilson interested in concrete in a rigorous way—he doesn’t have much steam without it. If he’s made the viewer more fascinated by his accidental subject, that’s probably best regarded as an accident itself.