In the romanticizing of 90s indie music, it's oft said that no band better epitomized the rock & roll slacker ethos of rebelling against establishment/commercialism/‘whatever else ya got’/etc. than Pavement. If true enough, then how exactly do you make a movie about Pavement?
The answer as put to Alex Ross Perry by Matador Records seems to be to make every movie about Pavement… and a museum exhibit… and a community theater-style musical. The result is Pavements, a hilariously kaleidoscopic telling of the band’s mythologized story and ostensible meaning, while simultaneously functioning as an appropriately wise-ass satire of the non-music mediums that typically seek to capture the essence of musicians. Paraphrasing Perry’s words, is there any high-brow film genre lower than the music biopic?
If not, then surely there is no form of theater worse than the jukebox musical… enter ‘Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical’, staged by Perry, starring an immensely likable Michael Esper (from Broadway’s American Idiot) and only in retrospect elaborately staged for the mad-genius purposes of this fascinating film. The musical itself, which from what Pavements shows us seems to be some suburban Scranton fantasy of slacker longing, is a Waiting For Guffman-style gutbuster, and for Pavement fans willing to bend their notions of ‘song as sacred’, brilliantly realized with inspired musical arrangements.
Perhaps the most tickling pieces of the Pavements puzzle are the intermittent snippets of “Range Life’, an on-the-nose Oscar-contending biopic starring big names like Stranger Things’ Joe Kerry as Stephen Malkmus, Jason Schwartzman as Matador Records’ Chris Lombardi, and Tim Heideker as Gerard Cosloy.
This Pavement examination hones in on the band’s telling Wowee Zowee/Lollapalooza era which seemed to epitomize the tension between the labels’ hopes for the band’s commercial potential versus Malkmus’ personal and, some would say, self-sabotaging sense of ‘suck’cess. Given that in the anti-corporate Reality Bites 90s, the worst thing you could be accused of being was a world-class fad, it’s a treat to see Perry offer the band the sickeningly polished docudrama treatment.
Meanwhile, the mock biopic Range Life has its own making-of mockumentary complete with footage of the baffling world premiere and post-screening Q&A featuring Perry and his somewhat mystified-looking subjects. If you show Stephen Malkmus a film that rhymes with Pavement, will he kill your parents and roast them on a stick? That the film even dares to ask this question is one of its most endearing strengths.
‘The Making of Range Life’ mostly follows a very funny Joe Keery ‘doing the work’ of delving into the profound question of ‘Who is Stephen Malkmus?’. What makes him tick? Surely, it’s in how he inflects, but can a voice coach teach Keery the key to the man? In tracking Keery’s artist’s journey, we’re given yet another layer of biography with more stories that do somehow, in fact, add up to a fairly full, if self-effacingly embarrassed portrait of the band.
Lastly, there is the most straightforward square of the rockumentary quilt, which is a solid throughline of great audio interviews, all the archival footage fans could hope for, and an ingeniously staged pop-up exhibit forcing the members of Pavement to confront the artifacts of Perry’s archeological dig head on.
This last medium is where your standard filmmaker would have begun and ended their cinematic investigation, but hats off to Perry for overthinking his assignment to such an obsessive degree to go as far as to weaponize Pavement's smirking contempt for commercial ambition as a means to attack nauseating sellout projects with the oxymoronic slickness of A Complete Unknown.
What holds it all together is the clear fact that buried under all this ironic bending-over-backward to differentiate itself from all aspects of the typical music film is a deeply heartfelt, and hyper-thoughtful ode to a band many of us hold dear. It’s hard to imagine how the film will come off to those who don’t enter the proceedings with much context. But I imagine the hope is that the uniqueness of Pavements intrigues enough to allow newcomers the desire to uncover what kind of band could have possibly inspired such an elaborately all-encompassing interpretation.
Perhaps your likelihood to enjoy this film comes down to your preferred Dylan adaptation. If you’re looking forward to James Mangold’s upcoming Oscar contender, A Complete Unknown, all the power to you, but Perry’s multifaceted snarky-as-fuck vision may not be your cup of tea. If, however, you’d rather the document-eating suppositions of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, which features Malkmus on its delicious soundtrack, take it from me, Pavements is pure gold.