“The world’s most important and influential band breaks up and it’s not a big deal.” Thus begins Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, establishing from the jump the veins of both puckishness and earnestness that will run through this atypical, asymmetrical portrait of early-’90s indie rock wunderkinds Pavement. And on both aesthetic and thematic terms, it’s a savvy approach, matching the shabby, convention-busting tenor the band embraced as their public persona. In construction, Perry’s latest project is a docufiction melange built from four distinct parts: a BTS-primed documentary surrounding the group’s 2022 reunion tour; a look at Slanted! Enchanted!, a Pavement-themed musical Perry put on (also in 2022); coverage of a museum exhibit the director curated in conjunction with the musical’s production; and a parody of big-budget musician-based biopics. In its conception of “narrative” shape and approach to (de)construction of myth, then, Pavements lands closer to Margin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, or to a lesser degree Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground, than your average dime-a-dozen rock ‘n roll re-tellings that clog streaming services on a regular basis.
Of course, the predictable flip side to this quartering is that some of the film’s various trajectories work better than others. Aided by Robert Greene’s editing work, Pavements is at its mischievous best when assembling actual events from the band’s history next to the film’s fictional biopic segments, mining the faux-melodrama built into the DNA of such Hollywood productions for levity, especially when set beside archival footage that actively refutes any such conveniences of incident or psychology; most emblematic of that here might be the film’s presentation of the infamous Lollapalooza mud-slinging and its aftermath. Even the purely fictional remains actively, amiably playful: it feels like a patented Perry, purveyor of the human, moment when Joe Keery, “playing” frontman Stephen Malkmus, turns down SNL while being distracted by animal pratfall videos on the TV, while elsewhere it’s tough to imagine something more antithetical to the rocker than when Keery muses about the role in fake behind the scenes footage: “It’s good for my career. Maybe win an award.” Still, despite the obvious logical basis for this approach to telling the story of Pavement, it’s likely to remain firmly rooted in variable mileage territory. The parodical is here handled more with a bemused wink than teeth-bared cheesing, and some viewers will find only ouroboros humor in the film’s send up narrative storytelling conventions and ironic implications, especially living in the post-Dewey Cox world that we do.
And then there are Pavements’ less consistently successful elements: its coverage of Slanted! Enchanted! and the museum exhibit. The latter feels largely like an afterthought, and a concession for those who are craving more straightforward feeling from Pavements, though it does deliver a few welcomely candid moments, and gets at the genuine reverence Perry clearly holds for the band. Documentation of the Slanted! Enchanted!, however, is a little more more crudely incorporated, proving demonstrative of the dangling threads to which the film can occasionally fall victim, in this particular instance hooking viewers at first with the musical’s raison d’etre — marrying the slacker detachment of Pavement’s music and lyrical content with the dogged earnestness of musical theater — but then doing little to further explore this notion, either in its artistic process or any shifting understanding of its material aims. Instead, viewers are largely left from this point to take in talking head observations from the musical’s players (Zoe Lister-Jones among them) and glimpse bits of its workshopping that are cut into the film’s larger mosaic.
Still, there’s something mildly irresistible about Pavements’ sly and lightweight nature, which is at once wholly reflective of the band’s original spirit and at odds with their enduring musical and cultural legacy that has developed in the intervening years. Like the band itself, Perry film’s is iterative in fascinating ways, layering fiction and nonfiction in an effort to destabilize notions of either, exploring more legibly what is latent in the heart of all biography. Perry knows the essential limitations of straightforward portraiture, hagiographic or not, and so delivers something admittedly flawed but far freer. The result is a film less interested in dancing in the embers of nostalgia and mythology than kicking them up in the air in order to be awash in the experience of them. The effect is ephemeral, but Pavements understands (and Pavement understood) that it only ever was.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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