Review: An idiosyncratic tribute for an idiosyncratic band

The Velvet Underground emerged from the '60s downtown New York avant-garde arts scene and launched the career of Lou Reed before the mercurial rocker walked away six years later

As a young man starting college, director Todd Haynes fell immediately for the Velvet Underground — the band which, musician Brian Eno famously said, didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one went and started a band.

It sounds like the storyline of a great fictional music film: Amidst the flower-power hippie era, a rock band emerges from the New York avant-garde art scene with the opposite ethos, dressed in black with an outsider vibe, singing about drugs and seedy sex. This group of unlikely personalities and unwieldy talent collaborates with Andy Warhol on edgy shows that meld music, visual art and performance — a unique mix that brings little commercial success. But the band will be credited as one of the most influential in rock history.

“The Velvet Underground,” Haynes’ wonderfully idiosyncratic, brilliantly constructed rock doc – or rockumentary? – tells just that story. And it’s true.

Unless you are, like Haynes, a diehard fan of the band that launched the career of Lou Reed and was managed by Warhol, you might find it surprising that some refer to it in the same breath as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But such is the regard in which the Velvet Underground is held by many, who point to its influence on punk and other styles — even though it lasted some six years before the mercurial Reed walked away in 1970, and never achieved real mainstream success.