Pavements

This tricksy hybrid doc-slash-fiction film opens with a disclaimer lifted from “Frontwards,” off Pavement’s 1992 EP Watery, Domestic: “The stories you hear, you know they never add up.” Pavements presents its own kind of fast and loose accounting, telling the story of the Nineties indie rock trailblazers – “the World’s Most Important and Influential Band,” the film announces with equal parts tongue-in-cheek pomposity and total earnestness – via methods both traditional to documentary filmmaking and, well, not so much.

The doc part is easy enough to explain. Independent filmmaker Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell, Listen Up Philip) has a trove of archival footage to work with – see Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus grimacing through another soul-crushing interview with MTV; see Malkmus in a snit at Lollapalooza – plus fresh footage of the band as they reconvene in 2022 for a reunion tour.

Now here’s where things get weird. In tandem, Perry mounts three separate projects (fake, but also sorta not?) to celebrate Pavement: a pop-up museum exhibit; a biopic called Range Life starring Stranger Things’ Joe Peery as Malkmus; and a jukebox musical, Slanted! Enchanted!, featuring belt-it-to-the-rafters Broadway performers. These fictional strands are woven into the “real” stuff, with the real-life members of Pavement interacting with the manufactured elements as the three projects progress. We’re witness to snippets of exhibit curation, the casting of the productions, the actors chewing over their process, and even some of the performances. (Slanted! Enchanted! was briefly staged for the public in a real workshop that Rolling Stone called an “ultimate absurdist theater experience,” while excerpts of the fake biopic unspool within the film bearing a cheeky “For Your Consideration” watermark.)

Honestly, it’s harder to explain the collagist effect than it is to just consume it, although godspeed to anyone who isn’t already a Pavement fan. I am – indeed, from roughly ages 15 to 21, Pavement was the World’s Most Important and Influential Band for Me in Particular – and even I scratched my head a couple times trying to parse real from not real. (Wait, I wondered, did I forget that Pavement shot an Apple “Think Different” ad??) The invented artifacts are interesting for the ways they dance with plausibility (quaintly, whether or not a band had sold out was a topic of intense interest for fans and rock critics alike back then). Similarly, the way the hired-actors-playing-themselves-playing-parts-in-a-made-up-movie engage with their roles provides a side door into examining the band’s lore.

I admit to having less of an appetite for these kinds of reality-blurring shenanigans now that we live in a disinformation hellscape, but also, it’s just... a lot. The faux biopic especially eats up a lot of minutes without always enriching or complicating what we think, or think we know, about the band. But what a trip. By the time we glimpse the tap-dancing conclusion of Slanted! Enchanted! with its sonic layering of Pavement’s catalog, “Here” harmonizing with “Gold Sounds” harmonizing with “Shady Lane,” I swallowed a surprise lump in my throat. Just because Pavements is a prankish film about a prankish band doesn't make it any less deeply heartfelt. It’s one for the fans – and we are legion.