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The cultural dissonance of the Velvet Underground era had personal meaning for Haynes as a gay man looking for his artistic footing in the ’70s. It’s his first full-length documentary, but he has been making unconventional music films for decades, from “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” (1988) to his take on glam rock and David Bowie in “Velvet Goldmine” (1998) to the fractured narrative of “I’m Not There” (2007) in which six actors played different versions of Bob Dylan. It seems almost inevitable that Haynes would find his way to making this film. If hippies were hot, the Velvets were cool. Born out of the post-beat, avant-garde New York art scene where Andy Warhol was the reigning deity, the band merged the visuals of experimental films, the atonal whir of modern music, and the poetry of outsiders.
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The Velvets clearly did not aspire to the inclusiveness and community that was the zeitgeist of the counter-culture.
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“We hated the hippies,” snaps Velvet’s drummer Maureen Tucker, one of the two surviving members of the group interviewed for the film. Cut to a shot of the paisley-clad California-dreaming Mamas and Poppa’s crooning in perfect four-part harmony, “Monday, Monday.” Armed with a collection of off-putting songs about addiction, sadism, and sexual exploitation, and dressed totally in black, the Velvets are seen making their first trip to the West Coast where they were largely ignored and scorned in Los Angeles. One of the most revealing scenes in Todd Haynes’s imaginative and entertaining documentary, “The Velvet Underground,” about the quintessential New York hipster band of the late ’60s, illustrates exactly what they were, and, perhaps more importantly, what they were not.