There’s a lot of critical oohing and aahing over the fact that, for his first documentary, director Todd Haynes (Dark Waters, Carol, Safe) gets a bit adventurous in depicting the meteoric rise and fall of the legendary 1960s New York band the Velvet Underground. There is lots of gorgeous split-screen work, for example, mostly creating a diptych effect but sometimes adding screens for triptych, quadriptych, or even a full mosaic effect of a dozen images.

Haynes dedicated the documentary, streaming now on Apple TV+, to avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, because, as Haynes puts it, he wanted it “to feel like the images and the music were leading your experience as a viewer, and that the oral history . . . would have to play just behind all of that.”

There are moments in The Velvet Underground when this approach works beautifully — such as Mekas saying, “New York became a place where artists escape,” while the black-and-white tortured-youth imagery representing Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s lonely childhoods on Long Island and in Wales, respectively, suddenly leaps into vivid color and faster tempo. It’s a smart way to kick off the film: it mirrors aspects of the music they’ll wind up making together, with the more Reed-driven, dark, agitated sounds and lyrics resting on Cale’s steady “drone” — the sonic, industrial landscape of what he called “the sound of Western civilization.”