Drella’s cover portrait, overlaid with their former manager’s ghostly visage, illustrates Haynes’s central question: how did these two men make music in Warhol’s shadow? Nico made some records too!) It’s telling that the montage climaxes with Reed and Cale’s reunion on Songs for Drella, their posthumous tribute record for Andy Warhol. Cale’s replacement, Doug Yule, briefly fronted the band after Reed went solo in 1970. Drummer Moe Tucker held down office jobs and recorded a few albums. (Guitarist Sterling Morrison left to become a medieval studies scholar. Unfortunately, he yadda yaddas everything that happens after the band’s seminal 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico. He is primarily concerned with Lou Reed and John Cale’s frictional partnership and its collision with New York’s underground art scene. But the montage also reveals Haynes’s priorities. So, it’s disappointing to see him stumble into such clichéd exposition. While this is Haynes’s first music documentary, he has made compelling cinema from queering the biographies of Karen Carpenter, David Bowie, and Bob Dylan. It’s the cinematic equivalent of concluding an essay with “…And then all this other stuff happened (shrug), the end.” It’s also symptomatic of the perfunctory storytelling that stymies the rock doc’s cousin, the music biopic. Within its generic context, the album cover montage often scans as time mismanagement. That hint is frustrating for two reasons. It hints at the prolific afterlife of proto-punk legends who continued (or continue, in the case of John Cale and Doug Yule) to make vital music long after the band’s and the film’s truncated timeline. The needle drop is poignant, as “Ocean” was part of a shelved project until Verve released the VU compilation in 1985. The sequence is cut to “Ocean,” a meditation on depression’s undertow that the band originally recorded in June 1969. To transition from the band’s turn-of-the-70s burnout, the filmmakers make a collage of their post-VU projects. In The Velvet Underground’s final stretch, director Todd Haynes and editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz indulge in one of my least favorite music documentary conventions: the album cover montage.
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