“The History of Concrete” is an amusing amble through that construction material’s lineage, especially as it pertains to New York. And New Yorkers.

It’s by doc filmmaker/essayist John Wilson, which should tell you its light tone and short-attention-span aimlessness, if you recall his quirky and quixotic HBO series “‘How To’ with John Wilson.”

The new doc is basically an extension of that three-years-canceled series, a film about a documentary filmmaker groping about for a subject that interests him and lends itself to his voice-over-narrated drollery after losing that series.

He wants to “make art.” Wilson needs that “art” to be something other people will want to see and thus a film third parties will want to invest in. Tricky.

“You never felt so helpless,” he says, in that NPR “storytelling” style he’s adopted. Every pause in every second person point-of-view sentence is packed with performantive pauses.

“You live in a…historical designated neighborhood.” “You’re…constantly surrounded on all sides….by concrete trucks.”

That’s his experience of New York. That’ll be his subject, “the second most used material on the planet.”

Concrete. Not just “cement.” Wilson has others explain the difference as he learns it for the first time. He relates to the crumbling foundation of the old inner-city house with upstairs and downstairs apartments that he bought when his checks from HBO weren’t residuals for .49 cents. He sees the “poor craftsmanship” of the shoddy repairs of the boroughs’ gutters, kerbs and sidewalks. He has an expert point to the cracking and rusting (exposed rebar) state of bridges, overpasses and buildings all around him.

“You,” John Wilson, have your next film’s subject. It’s only after shooting lots of footage, chats and encounters and watching concrete as it is being made, worked, repaired and still crumbling, followed by Zoom meetings with possible financiers. that he begins to question it.

“The material…you had so far wasn’t really…exciting anybody.”

What’s fun here is Wilson’s roundabout way of getting to that point. He starts the film lamenting the loss of cachet and fame and salary that his series gave him, stumbles across a “How to Write Hallmark Movies” Reddit, and attends a Writing a Hallmark Movie workshop where he learns their magic formula and why The Hallmark Channel will be the last cable service standing.

A Hallmark employee, working at the mundane concrete warehouse/soundstages complex just across the border in Canada where a lot of these “Second Chance Love in the Boondocks” “Meeting Mr. Right at Christmas” tales are shot lets slip the brand’s best unkept secret.

“We’re telling the same story over and over…Wash, rinse and repeat.”

No, Wilson won’t make a Hallmark movie or shoot an Arby’s commercial. He’ll get financing, fly to Rome where he asks construction workers and Roman cops standing in front of the ancient concrete-domed Pantheon “the secret” to Roman “self-healing” concrete.

Like they’ll know.

He travels to Bellefontane, Ohio, home of the “first concrete street in America,” which was built in 1891 and is patched to death and still crumbling under the weight of modern traffic. He’ll ride along with a driving school instructor as she has students use that street, and where she also points out “The Highest Point in Ohio” and “The Shortest Street in the U.S.”

“The History of Concrete” is random by intention, quirky by discovery. The film coincidentally arrives the same summer as a “comeback” film by the documentary essayist who invented the genre, Ross McElwee. He’s the fellow who made “Sherman’s March” back in the ’80s, a doc that started out as a “lingering legacy of the Civil War” in the South and morphed into a navel gazing account of other our filmmaker’s quest — with the assistance of others — to find love that lasts in the Reagan ’80s.

“Concrete” comes out in the Youtube/Instagram era when we’re all “stars” of our own videos. There are laughs in it. Wilson’s mania for videoing any business or street sign with “Butt” or “Tit” in it ironically lowbrow. His cute interviews, ducking onto indie film shoots (uninvited), sampling the “apartment as music venue” mania among his peers, joining the city’s lone “Gum Buster” for a cleaning session of gun removal from sidewalks, are both revealing and cute.

But Wilson’s wandering efforts to connect with a musician or music group worthy of a “rockumentary” before lurching back to New York’s “too much/too little” concrete problem (affordable housing vs. organized “NIMBYs”) and his constant dry, semi-detached/semi-ironic second-person narration compensating for the lack of focus by declaring the metaphor in all this is “everything’s impermanent” makes this an acquired taste.

So in Wilson-speak terms, “You” might like it more than I did.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: John Wilson, Michael Rispoli, many others

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Wilson. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:01