A Joyfully Chaotic Tribute to Pavement in “Pavements”

Rock documentaries and bio-pics have been parodied for nearly as long as they have existed, but there’s a reason for their ingrained absurdity that’s even weightier than fan service: music rights. Without the coöperation of musicians or of their estates, a music-centered movie risks ending up like Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” and John Ridley’s “Jimi: All Is by My Side,” deprived of the songs crucial to their stories. Hence, hagiography. With “Pavements,” Alex Ross Perry both skirts and embraces the problem: his admiration for the band Pavement is manifest throughout, and his apparent desire isn’t to investigate or to plumb the hidden depths but to celebrate the band—and to do so in a way that exalts its own self-deprecating mode of anti-stardom. The resulting film is a kaleidoscopically shifting—and dazzling—collage of elements that have their irony built in and that, jammed together, meld intense sincerity with self-parody (above all, Perry’s own) in an artificial artifact that nonetheless proves more authentic than a plain and unadorned recording.

The band, which formed in 1989 and broke up in 1999, is fully involved, present not just in archival footage but in new interviews and in sequences that Perry filmed documenting their 2022 reunion tour. But there’s much more to the game. Perry created three Pavement-centric art projects to be featured in the movie: a jukebox musical, “Slanted! Enchanted!,” about which my colleague Holden Seidlitz wrote when it was staged, in 2022; a museum show of the band’s memorabilia, called “Pavements 1933-2022”; and, finally, a movie within the movie, “Range Life,” a spoof bio-pic dramatizing the band’s activities in 1995.

In other words, “Pavements” is the fruit of several years of wry contrivances, pranks, and stunts, and the band plays along with them. The tumultuous results invite hyperbole; Perry talks about the work as a free mashup of a wide variety of rock-centric movies, “a semiotic experiment” that’s also “like throwing spaghetti at the wall,” and I’m looking at an e-mail I sent to a colleague right after seeing the film in which I call it a “quasi-pseudo-mocku-docu-biopic.” But the method to Perry’s—and the band’s—madness becomes apparent if one thinks about another movie, strictly fictional, in which one narrative is shown in a few distinct and giddy incarnations: Jared Hess’s “Gentlemen Broncos,” from 2009. There, a teen-age sci-fi author named Benjamin (Michael Angarano) goes to a young-writers’ conference and has a story of his pilfered, twice—once by an older writer, and again by a pair of adolescent independent-film sharks. Hess intercuts three different versions of Benjamin’s story into the drama—Benjamin’s own mental image of it, the older writer’s mental image of it, and the teen filmmakers’ movie of it—along with the latter movie’s making-of.

In “Pavements,” Perry himself is both the creator and the pilferer, the visionary and the distorter, the gleeful self-betrayer who proves the essence of irony by getting to truth through falsehoods and by getting to authenticity through fabrication. With his tongue planted firmly in his cheek to keep from fits of laughter, he observes the casting and the choreography of the stage show, delighting in what he describes, in the film, as the effort to “put these ironic songs into the most sincere form: the jukebox musical.” The let’s-put-on-a-show eagerness of theatre contrasts sharply with the fuck-it attitude of the band’s self-presentation; yet, in Perry’s discerning view of the band members, he discovers that irony itself is a mode of performance undergirded with sincere principle. In his selection of archival clips—particularly ones of the group’s lead singer and main songwriter, Stephen Malkmus—he finds the gift of a natural performer, which, in short, is to rise to the moment, whether with musical flair or with a memorable quip or gesture—to do the cool thing at the right time.

The movie “Pavements,” which runs a little over two hours, is split just about in half, and its two distinct parts mark the difference between homework and creation, between compulsory figures and freestyle. The first half, too long by half, relates the band’s beginnings and ascent to moderate celebrity and great acclaim. “Pavements” ’s through line is a loose and spotty narrative of origin stories—childhood backgrounds, college meetings, early collaborations, the various musical configurations that preceded Pavement—and of how the band found its way into a career, a sound, and an ethos. This early part features insightful remarks by the band members about their relationships and their art—as when they riff on their formative influences. (Malkmus says, “The whole record collection kind of melts into what you are. The music you do is—some of it is you, but eighty per cent of it is a fantasy of other people you like”—talking like a New Wave director about a decade at the Cinémathèque.)

This first hour-plus also weaves into its narrative the development of the three Pavement-centric meta projects (musical, museum, bio-pic). It introduces the actors who’ll play the roles of the band members in the bio-pic “Range Life,” including Joe Keery, as Malkmus; Nat Wolff, as Scott Kannberg, a.k.a. Spiral Stairs; Fred Hechinger, as Bob Nastanovich; and Griffin Newman, as Steve West—and who, in so doing, play comedic versions of themselves. (Chris Lombardi, whose label Pavement records for, is played by Jason Schwartzman.) It shows musical-theatre actors trying out for “Slanted! Enchanted!” and going into rehearsal. The museum display (hilarious in its reverence—it includes one band member’s ostensible toenail, “on loan from a private collector”) is inaugurated by a bit of history—Malkmus and West worked, for a while, as security guards at the Whitney Museum, when it was still in the Marcel Breuer building, on Madison Avenue. Keery, paying a visit there, reverently intones that the group’s album “Slanted and Enchanted” “was birthed in these halls.” To impersonate Pavement’s leader, Keery indulges in some comedic Method acting, considering taking a museum-guard job; when working with a dialect coach, he gazes reverently at a photo of Malkmus’s pharynx, wistfully commenting that everything he’s been working on for the film “has all come from this place.”

The opening half revels in the movie’s meta conceits, interlacing a range of materials and narrative threads—archival footage of the band in performance, in interviews, on TV, at rehearsals, or just plain hanging out; interviews with Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth, for whom Pavement opened; plus recent interviews and hangouts with the members as they plan their reunion tour, and the three art projects along with the behind-the-scenes for each one. Nonetheless, the chronological march of the band’s backstory and its early days feels forced and—for all its idiosyncrasies—conventional. The prime delight of the first section is sheerly aesthetic—the editing, by Robert Greene, frequently deploys split screens, with two or more shots sharing the frame in separate rectangles of their own. It’s above all his intricate vision, lending stylistic unity to the mainly informational assemblage of disparate elements.

The second part of “Pavements” ups the conceptual ante: it starts with a title card announcing that it’s a screener of the faux bio-pic “Range Life: A Pavement Story” that’s being provided for awards consideration, as if it’s intended for critics, Academy members, and other industry insiders. (It even comes with a burned-in watermark, of the kind used to prevent piracy, for a faux movie studio called Paragon Vantage.) Though this second part continues the band’s chronology, it starts in medias res, with Chris reproaching the band for seeming indifferent to building a fan base and for the concrete manifestation of such indifference—an apocalyptic Lollapalooza show, in 1995, at which Pavement was booed and pelted with mud and other debris until the band left the stage, one member mooning the hecklers and cursing them out. The difference is evident from the start: with the deep backstory out of the way, the second part can realize the project’s potential, its splendidly original style and its overarching thematic connections establishing a powerful synthesis. Here, Greene’s split-screen mosaics transform the gathered elements into a heatedly forged experience.

This faux screener introduces the stage play, the museum show, and the faux bio-pic to the public (or some staged semblance thereof) and leads to yet another vortex of ironic instability. Members of Pavement take part in these events, interacting with the actors who play them, attending the exhibit with an odd and unnatural sense of nostalgic wonder, and participating in a post-screening Q. & A., moderated by the real-life film programmer Jake Perlin. These set pieces are a muffled barrage of outrageous clichés distilled from the bio-pic universe, capped by the happy-ending public markers of success: the enthusiastic headline of Seidlitz’s New Yorker piece features, and there’s a backstage get-together with Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach to celebrate the (fictitious) inclusion of a Pavement song on the “Barbie” soundtrack.

Though Pavement is the star and the performers in its orbit are all in supporting roles, “Pavements” is distinguished by cinematic artistry that’s as distinctive as it is personal. “Range Life” may be a Pavement story, but “Pavements” is a Perry film, or, rather, a Perry-and-Greene film. If there’s an underlying story of a band whose very fame is treated as a comedic fiction, at least the band has acclaim sufficient to be ironized, whereas Perry, one of the most original American independent filmmakers of the past fifteen years, has been, until now, unduly under the radar of the industry at large. He has done Hollywood screenwritings for hire, but his own movies—such as “The Color Wheel,” “Queen of Earth,” and “Golden Exits”—though aptly appreciated in independent-film coteries, have hardly been present on the revival and repertory circuit. “Pavements” isn’t his first rock movie; his 2018 drama “Her Smell” starred Elisabeth Moss as a locally celebrated singer on the verge of a breakthrough who, in the grips of emotional turmoil, instead flames out. That film does what “Pavements” doesn’t: with fiction, it goes deep into the inner life of an artist and leaves out little of the destructive and self-destructive furies unleashed offstage. (No need to get music rights from fictitious artists.) Instead, what Perry puts through the wringer in “Pavements” is the music itself, which is delivered teemingly on the soundtrack in a peculiarly wide range of formats, including in the musical-theatre format and in cover performances by other bands, as if in an experiment to show how far the songs can be pushed while still revealing their essence.

I spent a few days on the set of another Perry drama, “Listen Up Philip,” from 2014, which starred Schwartzman as a novelist in romantic and professional conflict, and I was surprised to find how the director’s urgent and concentrated images were composed. He and the cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, discussed the scene; then Williams, mostly doing handheld camerawork, found his way toward and into it, as if turning the scene into a documentary-style unified field of action, something there to be discovered rather than displayed. Their collaboration has extended throughout Perry’s feature-film career; in “Pavements,” the cinematographer, Robert Kolodny, is also, like Williams, a documentary veteran, and Perry, creating large-scale and turbulent action in each of his major Pavement-centered art projects, overtly approaches them with a documentary sensibility. In effect, the movie creates a tempestuous Pavement world awaiting cinematic parsing and recombination.

That recombination—honoring both the tumult and the logic—happens through the editorial artistry of Greene, who is pretty much the reigning godfather of modern docu-fiction, as in such films as “Actress,” “Kate Plays Christine,” “Bisbee ’17,” and “Procession” (which Kolodny shot). For all the incisive boldness of Greene’s editing up until now—on his own films, most of Perry’s, and Kolodny’s “The Featherweight”—there’s nothing in those movies to suggest the radical intricacy of “Pavements.” With “Pavements,” both filmmakers jolt their filmographies into strange new territory, and its strangeness is suggested by the hour-plus of screen time before they succeed in leaving familiar paths and striking out into the wild. ♦