Director: Alex Ross Perry Starring: Pavement, Zoe Lister-Jones, Michael Esper, Kathryn Gallagher, Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Griffin Newman, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller Running Time: 128 minutes
Alex Ross Perry’s affinity for a chaotic and self-destructive artist is well-established in his filmography. His 2014 feature, Listen Up Philip, is an examination of the egotism of the novelist, rendered with exquisite obnoxiousness by his frequent collaborator, Jason Schwartzman. His last feature film, 2018’s Her Smell, follows a legendary punk rocker trying to recapture early success while battling addiction issues and confrontation with her fellow band members. Compared to Philip Lewis Friedman or Becky Something, Stephen Malkmus is a relatively tame subject, but Perry’s interest in him and his band Pavement’s position in the canon of great American bands has led to an off-Broadway musical and now, a film entitled Pavements.
Pavements is a hard film to cogently explain to others. Weaving four separate narrative threads together to create a madcap, metatextual look at alt-rock’s kings of apathy, the film’s spine is a familiar-feeling hagiographic look at the band themselves, jumping back and forward between their rise and fall through the 90s and the rehearsals for their 2022 Reunion Tour. Circling this, we have three projects, each spearheaded by Perry, arriving in conjunction with this tour: a pop-up museum exhibit, an off-Broadway jukebox musical using their songs, and a fake movie biopic of the band.
The pop-up museum features artefacts of the band’s history, and aside from some staged interviews at its grand opening, it is mostly glimpsed to refer to featured artefacts, some of which are genuine and some which are contrived as an expression of the band’s sarcastic Gen-X brand of art. The off-Broadway play, entitled Slanted! Enchanted!: A Pavement Musical and starring Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones and Kathryn Gallagher, is shown from early auditions right up to its live performances on December 1st and 2nd 2022. Despite the very real narrative created and the utterly fascinating arrangements of slacker rock anthems as earnest musical numbers, the play was created and performed solely for inclusion in this film.
The final of these added narratives, the fake biopic, is the one that works best within the chaotic cocktail of the film. Going to Inception-level depths of acting within acting, it follows Perry casting, discussing and shooting the fake film with real actors (Keery, Wolff, Hechinger, Miller and Newman) playing exaggerated versions of themselves in fake behind-the-scenes footage, and also playing the members of the band in the fake biopic itself. The actors talk about the film (entitled Range Life) as if it were a real project, and clips of scenes play as part of the film, ironically watermarked with ‘For Your Consideration’ as if being submitted for awards. The main throughline of this narrative is Joe Keery’s actor’s journey to become Stephen Malkmus, a hilarious send-up of method acting that becomes all the more hilarious when you consider that it’s the exact type of performance that Timothée Chalamet could win an Oscar for on Sunday night. In one particularly amusing scene, Keery discusses getting a picture of Malkmus’ tongue for his voice coach so that he can accurately recreate the frontman’s voice.
What’s striking about Pavements from the outset is how quickly Perry captures the band’s essence and attitude, and then uses it to back up every weird decision he makes in the film’s construction. Pavement, from their inception, have always been profoundly antisocial as a band in as much that they have always eschewed commerciality, clarity of message, or even the idea of people caring about what they do. Perry follows this antisocial attitude with the fake movie, tapping into the band’s dry, suburban-California humour, baffled at the idea that anyone would ever want to watch their rather rote and uninteresting life story. This is also evident in the museum exhibits winking at guests and viewers as it shows off items of dubious provenance or exaggerated importance.
The humour of the fake movie and the documentary footage insights with the band themselves are the stronger moments of Perry’s film, giving plenty of context to newcomers while also serving Pavement fans. As fascinating as the idea behind it is, the scenes of the musical production are the least engaging, primarily because we never see any of the song performances in full and thus never really get a sense of whether or not it was a successful project. It also contributes to the movie’s primary flaw: its length, and despite enjoying the chaos of it all, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would think it one of the best music documentaries of recent years if it were twenty minutes shorter.
I imagine that Pavement fans will adore what Perry has done here, and even the uninitiated will find fun in Joe Keery’s concerted, self-deprecating attempts to recreate Malkmus’ nasally anti-charisma. Fans of music documentaries will appreciate the experimentation at work; suffice it to say, if you like Rolling Thunder Revue or Moonage Daydream, you’ll probably enjoy Pavements. However, if you’re looking for a down-the-line history of the band, this may prove a little taxing. As a Pavement agnostic, it inspired me to finally listen to their magnum opus cum self-destruction project, 1995’s ‘Wowee Zowee’. I found it both incredibly good listening and also indecipherable dirge. I think both Stephen Malkmus and Alex Ross Perry would appreciate that assessment.
(3.5 / 5)