Pavements: Alex Ross Perry’s slanted and enchanted tribute to a canonical 1990s band

• Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film Festival

As a band, Pavement seems to invite an alternative approach to the usual potted-history-with-testimonials rock doc, and Alex Ross Perry has fully taken up the challenge. Echoing the band’s idiosyncratic medley of styles and signatures, and the weird-wise collage-like poetry of singer Stephen Malkmus’s lyrics, the hybrid Pavements speaks through several voices by combining a jukebox-style stage musical, a rock biopic, a plethora of archival footage and recollections, a gallery exhibition, and contemporary glimpses of the band members.  

What that means is you’ll hear a lot of this canonical 1990s band’s music in its heyday, in the layered and often split-screen presentation of new and archival footage, and that might also mean hearing snippets from the ‘Slanted! Enchanted!’ Pavement musical (which was staged for one weekend in New York). It’s fun, and also a bizarre thrill to see such thoroughgoing experimentation, which Pavement most certainly was down for, given their appearances as amused indie elders throughout the proceedings, playing along, and of course mesmerising in past footage. 

It’s all partly a response to the mild absurdity of making a music documentary about a band that can radiate a couldn’t-care-less stance. Pavement bridle in the 1990s manner against the trappings and tedium of label-affirmed success, a well-trod dynamic that plays out in parodic form in the biopic stretches, starring Joe Keery as an actor trying to get Stephen Malkmus’s vocal fry just right, and Jason Schwartzman as Matador Records co-head Chris Lombardi. Perry, who made a ripe-for-revisiting music drama Her Smell (2018) starring Elisabeth Moss as flaming-out 90s rock diva, knows that any rise-and-fall or sell-out narrative – the band dissolved in 2000 and most recently reunited for tours in 2022-23 – is futile and besides the point. Instead he fashions a crazy-quilt tribute with what might be called tongue-in-cheek sincerity. 

As a fan, I found it all sort of touching, rather than a feature-length goof or dire resurrection of ludic postmodernism. It’s wholly in keeping with a band that began their album Brighten the Corners with the seemingly inscrutable opener: “Pigs they tend to wiggle when they walk.” The songs groove and stop and start and veer like a lovely jalopy, or in moodier moments, a mystery train to who knows where. There‘s pure pleasure taken in language play and with bursts of feeling and cracked wisdom that belie the image of slack, lanky guys noodling away. Long-held grudges over cred or other rock posturing fall away as irrelevant before the artistry of the music. 

The formation of Pavement – starting with Stephen Malkmus and Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg – is covered along the way, but a perk of Perry’s approach is not being locked into a chronological march through album releases. Newcomers and fans should both have plenty to glean, or revisit in new contexts, and this critic’s personal “huh weird” moment came upon learning that my childhood wanders in the Whitney Museum of American Art occurred at the same time as Malkmus’s run as a security guard there alongside Bob Nastanovich and David Berman of the Silver Jews. Perry and crew take care with era-appropriate references, such as the film’s publicity still being in the white-border, black-and-white-photo style of band publicity shots. 

A funny little secret is that Pavement songs actually lend themselves quite well to musical numbers, and one is reminded somewhat of an illuminating aside from Malkmus, that he kept being drawn to making music in genres he hated (not that he hated musicals, but that showmanship and genre-play were threaded through the oddball oeuvre). And in what might otherwise be a nominal gag role, Leery exhibits deft comic timing as an actor who goes so far as employing a dialect coach to master Malkmus’s inflections (itself a nice touch of absurdism around obsessing about legitimacy in chronicling pop legends). Malkmus himself is ever an expert deadpan performer, today (admiring a fictive golden record award) and in archive clips. 

Credit is due to Perry’s right-hand man in wrangling a vast quantity of material and sustaining a structure, Robert Greene, who edited Pavements as well as Perry’s Listen Up Philip (2014) and Her Smell, and game cinematographer Robert Kolodny. By any reckoning, Pavements is a fairly busy affair yet manages to feel understated, as Perry continues (as in his fiction work) to bend movies into novel shapes. It’s all suitable playtime for the band that once riffed in “Shady Lane”: “Freeze! Don’t move. You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life.”