Pave­ments – first-look review

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 21^st 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 pre­mière 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.

This is the lat­est 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 pre­mière), 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.