Katey Rich: Well, Mike, I don’t want to say it’s entirely because of you that I spent my Friday night watching Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground. Haynes is a major filmmaker, the documentary got good reviews out of Cannes, and the Velvet Underground is one of the many major bands I always feel like I should know more about beyond that banana album cover. But I did know that you loved the movie, and I figured it would be interesting for me, someone who knew virtually nothing about the band, to see if it worked for me too. 

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

And it really did! It’s a comprehensive history of this one band and the people who made it, but even more importantly the era that created them, from the Fluxus art scene where John Cale got his start to Andy Warhol and the Factory. Haynes draws on archival video from the era to accompany the talking heads in a way that feels much more imaginative than the average documentary—I don’t want to say it’s experimental art exactly, but it definitely has a spirit of discovery, like you want to go look up some Fluxus films yourself when you’re done. 

But it was in the more traditional parts of the documentary that I felt a little left behind, particularly when it came to Lou Reed, who participates in the documentary only via archival interviews (he died in 2013). He was obviously such a driving force behind the band, and the relationship between him and John Cale must have been volcanic— but their falling-out, subsequent reunion, and even their artistic process get kind of glossed over. As a Velvet Underground die-hard, Mike, did you feel like that was missing too? Or is the “he said, he said” of their breakup something I should just dig into the memoirs to find? 

Mike Hogan: Hey, Katey, I’m proud to have had any role whatsoever in getting you to experience this film and the Velvet Underground’s music. Watching Haynes’s gorgeous and seductive treatment of the material, I realized that I feel very lucky to have discovered their music when I was a teenager, thanks to a friend who went deep down the Lou Reed rabbit hole. To answer your question about the memoirs, I think the thing to do is immediately order Please Kill Me, Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil’s profane, insane, and indispensable oral history of punk, which draws a line from the Velvet Underground to the New York Dolls to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, thereby enshrining them as the parents of the entire genre. Most of the gossipy stuff from the film is there, but the context is obviously different. Haynes is more interested than McCain and McNeil in the Velvet Underground’s roots in (and contributions to) experimental art, film, and music, and in Lou Reed’s complicated role in gay history. Reed’s sexuality has always been a bit of a puzzle. It’s tempting, in retrospect, to simplify the story by saying he was a gay man who could never fully accept that aspect of himself, in part because as a child he was subjected to shock therapy in an attempt to “cure” him. (His sister has denied this, saying her parents were “blazing liberals” who were trying to address his mental health issues.) But what, then, is one to make of his late-in-life love story with Laurie Anderson, seemingly the only time in his life he came close to being content?

Anyway, back to Reed and Cale. I don’t know that it was actually that complicated. The way I see it, Cale was interested in musical innovation, while Reed, as Haynes shows us, had one goal from the time he was in his early teens: He wanted to be a rock star. One of my favorite parts of the film is hearing Cale talk about how he was trying to compete with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and felt he had an advantage because no one would ever be able to figure out how he tuned his instrument. That’s a delightful but arguably naive notion of competition in the pop space. Reed’s version was more brutal but also maybe more realistic: I need to play guitar and sing in a band, and I need a gimmick. I don’t want to dismiss Reed’s artistry as a gimmick by any means. But throughout his career he got a lot of mileage from being the guy who could be meaner, more transgressive, and more unflinchingly adept at freaking out the squares than pretty much anybody else. To get noticed, he needed more than that. John Cale helped him find a unique and spellbinding musical counterpart to his lyrics. Andy Warhol helped him reach an audience of downtown scenesters and uptown art people who otherwise surely would have had no time for this suburban piker. And Nico helped bring a softness, sophistication, and mysterious weirdness to songs that, as V.U. drummer Moe Tucker puts it, might not even have worked otherwise. (Sung by a man, “Femme Fatale” arguably becomes a portrait of misogyny rather than jealousy.)

All of that is a long way of saying that when Reed decided that one of these people was holding him back rather than helping him, he dropped them. Often in a pretty spectacularly passive-aggressive way. Didn’t he send guitarist Sterling Morrison to tell Cale he was out of the band? Didn’t they record an entire album, White Light/White Heat, while basically not talking to one another? I think Reed was chasing his muse and didn’t really think much about anyone else. 

But here’s another question for you, Katey: Did you have the feeling you were born too late while watching this? Haynes’s depiction of Warhol’s New York was so loving that, at least for as long as the spell lasted, I was lamenting the fact that nothing like it will ever exist again, thanks to the internet or whatever.

Rich: I have to say that hearing the songs from Lou Reed’s postcollege years, including the incredibly catchy “The Ostrich,” was a huge surprise—I had no idea he was so laser-focused on stardom! But that explains why he made such good company with Andy Warhol, right? The collision of art and commerce in that period almost seems simple compared to the mess we have now, but both of them were thinking in such fascinating ways about what people like and why. 

But to answer your question, yes, of course it made me feel like I was born too late! That’s kind of a common theme for anyone who’s ever lived in New York, I think—you walk down a street and are faced with constant reminders of a fascinating time that came before you. I don’t think I would have been cool enough to hang out with Nico even if I’d been alive back then, but maybe I could have caught at least one live show? As the child of baby boomers, I think I am very predisposed to ’50s and ’60s nostalgia, and Haynes’s version of it is always even more fascinating somehow. Then again, there’s Amy Taubin’s description of the Factory as not exactly a great place for women, at least if you weren’t stunningly beautiful like Nico. So maybe the present has its upsides too? 

Mike, for someone who maybe isn’t predisposed to midcentury nostalgia, or who is skeptical about music documentaries in general, what would you say to sell them on The Velvet Underground? I’ve watched more than my share of extremely by-the-books documentary biopics this year, and I was so taken with the style of this movie, as it combines Warhol films and archival stock footage and really almost everything else to capture what really feels like the mood of the time, not just the raw details. Maybe that’s why it’s less important to understand the details of Lou Reed’s mood swings and more important to focus on the world that surrounded him. But that doesn’t sound like a good enough pitch, so, Mike, you tell the people why this is essential viewing even beyond the New York music scene die-hards. 

Hogan: First let me say that I’m glad you brought up Amy Taubin’s comments about how the Factory was difficult for women. And I don’t think being as beautiful as Nico solved the problem. Taubin was quite striking herself, as a matter of fact, but her point was that that was the only thing Andy—and by extension everyone else—cared about. I loved hearing from Jackson Browne, who wrote “These Days,” which Nico recorded so beautifully as a solo artist, about how focused she was on her craft as a musician, and we know from other sources that she was conflicted about her looks. It certainly wasn’t the thing she wanted to lead with in life—which of course was in the back of my mind when I heard Lou Reed offer an extremely rare expression of gratitude, saying the Velvet Underground never would have gotten anywhere without Warhol’s patronage and Nico’s...beauty.

But Warhol very presciently grasped and expressed America’s obsession with surface appearances, while also giving a lot of smart and powerful people permission to indulge that very obsession without thinking too hard about what lies beneath.

But you asked why people should care about this film.

Warhol is certainly part of it. We all have ideas, maybe stereotypes, of who he was, what he did, what it all meant. But it’s really worthwhile to go back to the source material and hear Cale say that the reason artists were drawn to Warhol was that he worked so hard and drove everyone else to do the same. You have Lou Reed reminiscing about an exchange with Warhol (which I’ll paraphrase): “How many songs did you write, Lou?” “Oh, I wrote 10, Andy.” “Oh, you’re so lazy. Why didn’t you write 15?” It really was a factory! And in that sense it’s obviously a precursor of many things that were to come, up to and including the content houses popping up around L.A., where influencers live together and everything’s paid for by brands or management companies. Except that whereas those folks are all hustling in service of an algorithm, it’s clear watching this film that Warhol actually protected the Velvet Underground’s vision from the usual pressures of the music industry.

Here’s where I may sound like an old fogy, but I think it’s important to note: These were real artists, with a genuine connection to the great traditions going back centuries. It’s no coincidence that Haynes starts the movie, basically, with the Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas talking about how New York in the ’50s was a place where European artists and young American mingled and made stuff together. Later, you have the experimental filmmaker and musician Tony Conrad positively gloating about how the Velvet Underground’s rock-and-roll music effectively ingested serious art music! He says (and this one I had to look up): “Pop dissolved high culture. That was what Lou brought in. That came bubbling out of Long Island...which is just what we had in mind.” 

It seems to me that Haynes has been circling around these ideas for a long time, in everything from Velvet Goldmine to Carol: the explosive chemical reactions that can occur when you fill a human crucible with a mix of suburban repression, unruly sexuality, and artistic ambition. So this is a perfect subject for him, and he makes the most of it.

At least I thought so. I wonder, film lover that you are, what you made of his Warholian touches, the most obvious being his juxtaposition of interviews and contemporary footage with those long, uncomfortable Screen Test portraits of Lou, John, Nico, and the rest?

Rich: I so loved those Screen Test portraits! First, what a gift to have someone just train a camera on you when you’re young and gorgeous, and what a great way to visualize the documentary impulse to look deeply into someone’s life and find some meaning. Finding priceless archival footage is important for many documentaries, of course, but the beauty of The Velvet Underground, I think, is what Haynes decides to do with it. He’s a major filmmaker who, as you put so well, really understands that midcentury desire to explode away from the suburban norm and create something brand new. 

I suppose I can wrap this up by leaning toward my favorite topic—the Oscars! The Velvet Underground will likely be in the best-documentary-feature race alongside another very good music doc, Questlove’s Summer of Soul; I actually think they make for a fascinating double bill, both portraits of very different parts of 1960s New York City. So if you haven’t seen Summer of Soul yet, Mike, you can work on that while I read Please Kill Me. Any other assignments for me, or anyone else who feels like they have a lot of exciting music education ahead of them? 

Hogan: Yes, it’s looking like we could have a showdown between two excellent and refreshingly non-formulaic music docs this year. 

As for further education, the first thing to do, if you’re not already familiar with it, is listen to The Velvet Underground and Nico, otherwise known as “the banana album.” It’s like the Rosetta stone of antiestablishment rock music from the past half century, and it sounds as vital today as it did then. And if you don’t already have Lou Reed’s 1972 solo album Transformer committed to memory, remedy that immediately. David Bowie and Mick Ronson produced it, and it’s arguably the best expression of Reed’s vision independent from Cale’s. Then go listen to Nico’s Chelsea Girl, which has songwriting and instrumental contributions from John Cale and three quarters of the original Velvets, as well as Jackson Browne, whose career she helped launch.

Film-wise, the thing I’m excited to rewatch is Haynes’s I’m Not There, his kaleidoscopic and deconstructed Dylan “biopic,” which, apart from anything else, expanded my own personal fandom by introducing me to the idea that not all of Dylan’s mid-’80s Christian music was terrible. Just watch Christian Bale sing “Pressing On” in the back of a Santa Monica storefront church and tell me that’s not great music!

One last thought, by the way, regarding the rock-doc formula. The standard one is the rise and fall, with the rise fueled by an explosion of youthful creativity and the fall fueled by drug-fueled decadence and exhaustion. A version of that happened here, but clearly that’s not a story that interests Haynes. I think the story he wants to tell is more like this: Through a rare and surprising alignment of cultural stars, something unique and powerful came into the world. Then those stars kept moving, until they were out of alignment, but that unique and powerful creation is still with us, and is still giving inspiration to those who pay it their attention.

— The Power of Passing: An Exclusive Trailer for Rebecca Hall’s Directorial Debut
— Ann Dowd Does It From the Heart—And May Soon Earn Her First Oscar Nom
— Golden Globes Overhaul Membership After Diversity Firestorm
— Riz Ahmed on New Film Mogul Mowgli and Fearing His Own Name
— The “Emotional Scuba Diving” Behind Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter
— Sign up for the “Awards Insider” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage.