In the early 1960’s, John Cale, a brilliant classical trained Welsh violist met Lou Reed, a middle-class Jewish college graduate from Long Island who said he was going to be a rock star.

They began a creative musical partnership that was supported by Andy Warhal and his Factory.

Their collaboration became the musical  group they called the Velvet underground, a radically different way of making popular music. The New York Times reported that the group altered the course of popular music.

As the movie demonstrates, it was revolutionary, fascinaating whether you like it or not.

I never closely followed the music of the Velvet Underground back when it began,  but I did understand it’s impact on rock and roll and I listened to a lot of Lou Reed’s later music.

I loved the movie created by director Todd Haynes (I’m Not There, his 2007 documentary about Bob Dylan).

Articulate and compelling people were rounded up in the movie to talk about what it was like as the band pursued it’s controversial and avant-garde approach to music, including two of the Velvet Underground members who are still alive.

The movie has a wide range to it, Haynes marvels at the stunning abundance of artistic activity in New York City in the last days when artists and young people could afford to come to the city and live there. In a sense, the film is as much about that artistic explosion in New York as it is about the group itself.

The VU’s big idea was what the critics called cross-pollination,  the crossing of the boundary the boundaries between music and poetry and painting and especially, film.  Until the group, popular musit never connected the dots to other forms of artistry. That had never been done before by a pop music  band.

The rigid boundaries that existed before them, argued Red and Cale, were no longer relevant. And they aren’t today. They linked the group closely to the experimental cinema booming in New York at the time.

The movie is, in a way, a work of art in itself,  the continuation of the boundary-crossing the group practiced.

It is a different kind of movie, unlike  any other music bio-op I rememver seeing.  Haynes wanted us to feel it, not just see it. He succeeded. If you are a movie lover, as I am, it’s worth seeing just for the way Hanyes created it.

Blessedly, Haynes didn’t feel the need to romanticze Red or the band member, or to sugar coat their very bad relationships with each other. What you see is what it was, a creative and very honest movie.

It’s an inventive, colorful and mesmerizing mix of split screens, grainy newsreels,graphic boxes, colorful lights,  performance videos and recollections, mostly coming at a fast pace that left me dazzled and hooked.

It’s as if Haynes wanted to prove Lou Reed’s point by re-creating it in documentary form. He crossed a number of lines himself.

Lou Reed, who had a successful career long after he left the group (Cale quit the group after feuding with Reed) was many things, but nice was not one of them.

Since he died in 2013 at age 71 (liver disease), he has become posthumously beloved. But no one who worked with him liked very much, he was described the peole who knew him – and even by his friends –  as nasty, cruel and temperamental.

In fact, the group wasn’t especially nice either.

Niceness was the very opposite thing the Velvet Underground ws trying to project.

“We hated that peace and love crop,” said the group’s  drummer Moe Tucker about a trip the band took to Lose Angeles. The artist Mary Woronov, who toured with the group on the West Coast, said of the California Love and Peace culture: “we hated hippies.”

The group was never especially political, according to the movie, but had strong protests to make with their music. They were outspokenly opposed to sentimentality, stupidity, faux consciousness and positive thinking. They  rejected anything cute and sweet.

In the movie, they reminded me of the the later punk rock rebellions, perhaps they planted the seeds.

The critics say the group was one of the most influential forces in pop music history.

They are credited with perpetual novelty and invention and a sound that is new, different and especially powerful.

As one who knew little about the group’s early years, I can say I loved the movie, it held my attention for all two hours, and touched me as the group turned on each other and fell apart, as seems to happen with so many rock and pop  groups. They seemed purposely grim and self-important. I’m not sure I saw a smile in all of the two hours.

They never seemed especially happy or together in the music they were making, but the time in which they worked and the legacy they left are impossible to miss.

The movie moves like a rock, and has an almost psychedelic dazzle and pace. It’s well worth seing.

I’m starting something new in my movie reviews, I call it the Sore Ass Rating.

Long movies give me a sore ass, and I ought to warn people about that. I give this movie five starts, but it also has a 3 Sore Ass rating. This was a terrific movie, but you’ve got your Sore Ass Warning, a new addition to my movie reviews. Five is for the sorest ass, three just for soreness.