It’s been six years since indie darling Alex Ross Perry whet his band-movie palette with the odious ace Her Smell. Ever since, the writer-director-producer has kept almost exclusively to directing music videos. Or so it seemed. As it turns out, Perry has been hard at work on a sprawling, singular band-movie project – a major stylistic departure and a magnum opus to date for the once-post-mumblecore filmmaker – Pavements.
For those that don’t know going in (like me), Pavement – or “The Slacker Rolling Stones of the 90s” as a talking head describes them – are one of the great disrupters of rock music history, which is funny when you look at a picture of them and even funnier when you hear them talk. The scene-shattering, genre-forming band that held indie rock court from 1989-1999 (with subsequent reunions in the 21st century) couldn’t seem less revolutionary.
Equal parts Pavement band history, 2022 reunion rehearsal, career museum exhibit, ironic stage musical, 9-figure biopic and behind-the-scenes mockumentary, Pavements is, above all, a trailblazing docufiction without borders. But what’s real and what isn’t?
The archival footage and the 2022 reunion tour? Real. The big-budget biopic? Fake. The exhibit? Real – well, sort of. The jukebox musical in New York City? Real-fake (they did rehearse and have two workshops, but it was never going to run like the movie suggests). The mockumentary? Real…in that it is fake. This movie? We’ll see. There’s no guarantee that whatever we watched/participated in at Venice isn’t simply the next pseudo-piece of the meta-pie. It wouldn’t be the first fake movie premiere of the project.
The constant blurring of the lines makes for a fascinating, often hilarious, watch. The idea that something absurd might be real – say, like, an actor developing vocal fry to play frontman Stephen Malkmus in the fake movie only to not be able to shake it and regret taking the role altogether – is comical. But the idea that they wrote this ridiculous thing about themselves (Malkmus is credited for the screenplay alongside Perry) is hysterical, like the numerous direct comparisons to The Beatles, given there is no band less like The Beatles than Pavement.
The film also marks the first collaboration between Perry and real-life wizard Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, Bisbee ‘17), who’s made an industry name for himself writing, directing, producing, and editing genre-bending blends of documentary and fiction, making him the perfect editor/producer to understand, clarify and build upon Perry’s ambitious vision to chronicle the band.
Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Tim Heidecker and Jason Schwartzman take roles in the faux-film, with Keery and Schwartzman proving particularly memorable. The former plays himself as a ditsy, overcommitted method actor sinking into the role of Malkmus for the upcoming biopic Range Life. Fake articles trumpet the anticipated grandeur of the “Paragon Vantage”-produced project and its enormous budget. Schwartzman, on the other hand, is primarily seen in the Range Life dailies as the band’s scrappy manager, delivering over-heartening one-liners while For Your Consideration watermarks on and off screen over swelling music and his hokiest, most emphatic moments.
To watch Pavements is to laugh with Pavement (all of whom were roaring during the premiere), to feel in on the joke, and nearly a part of the band. In that sense, it captures the artistry, ingenuity and humor of its subject better than an encyclopedic history ever could – a music doc for whom success, in the spirit of Pavement, looks very different.
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