‘Pavements’ Is Exactly the Type of WTF Rock Doc the Band Deserves
Alex Ross Perry was approached to make a documentary about Pavement. There was a slight hitch: The band kinda sorta did not want a documentary made about them. Or rather, they didn’t want one of those things where fans of the band talk about how amazing the quintet were, in between archival concert footage and Behind the Music-style interviews and cute animated transitions and all that jazz. The group had announced their first show in a decade, set to happen in 2020 — only to have the pandemic shut the world down. So, they were interested in celebrating what they’d accomplished over three-plus decades of being an on-again, off-again group. They just didn’t want Pavement for Dummies. Besides, singer-songwriter-guitarist Stephen Malkmus said, has there ever been a good movie about a rock band?
So Perry started thinking about what kind of film he might make if he were to do a film about Pavement. He could do a documentary about their history, sure. Or he could be a fly on the wall once the band started rehearsing for what would be a triumphant tour in 2022, and simply chronicle that. He could also do a biopic — people love music biopics! Or maybe he would do a jukebox musical around the band’s songs — people love those too! — and then film the process, thus capturing the band’s history via a new theatrical interpretation. And if he was going to celebrate the history of the guys who gave the world “Trigger Cut” and “Debris Slide” and the couplet “walk with your credit card in the air/swinging nunchakus like you just don’t care,” why not devote a museum exhibit to all of the ephemera around the band, from guitar picks to gig flyers to former drummer Gary Young’s toenail (the last one wasn’t a real item… or was it?) and film that too! Why couldn’t Perry make one of these movies? Why couldn’t he make all of them?
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Making its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival and coming on the heels of a one-off show at Midtown Manhattan’s Sony Hall, Pavements is Perry’s attempt to capture a band that refuses to be — or simply can’t be bothered with being — pinned down. The plural in the title is well-earned. It is, first and foremost, a portrait of a bunch of dudes, some from Stockton, California, and others from the Southern region of the U.S., who got together and recorded some ragged tunes that turned into indie-rock gold soundz. It’s also the story of Slanted! Enchanted!, an honest-to-Bob-Nastanovich musical theater extravaganza co-directed by Perry and starring American Idiot‘s Michael Esper, Jagged Little Pill‘s Kathryn Gallagher, and Zoe Lister-Jones, and based on the music of Pavement. Plus, you get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Range Life, Perry’s parody of a prestigious Oscar-bait biopic that casts Stranger Things‘ Joe Keery as Malkmus, Fred Hechinger as percussionist/hype-man Nastanovich, and Tim Heidecker as Matador Records co-founder Gerald Cosloy. Oh, and the museum exhibit, which mixes everything from real concert posters to fake mud-splattered outfits worn at a disastrous Lollapalooza stop? That’s in here, too.
The words arguably most associated with Pavement are “ironic” and “poetic,” which is what made them such an ideal band for the 1990s — the entire decade was all about rolling at your eyes at whatever you were doing while also being extremely good at doing it. (See: Beck, McSweeney’s, the lounge-music revival.) And it’s that the thin beige line separating the above descriptives that Pavements walks, which exactly why it’s the perfectly cracked, and downright perfect, doc on the band. The film is both honest in its love of a band that could be — when Malkmus wasn’t playing onstage autocrat or they weren’t musically colliding into each other — absolutely transcendent live, and yet completely acknowledges that the modern cottage industries around rock-band mythology are, like, so fucking whatever, man.
You can feel Perry rolling his eyes at the two-states endeavor while also being extremely good at blending all of this together, sending up the hyperventilating melodrama of Bohemian Rhapsody, et al., and raising his brows at Broadway’s lucrative subgenre of recycled greatest-hits compilations while also delivering something to make fans salivate. As if inspired by another veteran artist with decades under his belt, an iconoclastic back catalog, and a devoted cult following, the filmmaker dares to be stupid — how else to describe elaborately mounting a musical that features a couple belting “In the Mouth a Desert” as if it were the second coming of “Memory”? Or to follow Keery as he goes down the Method hole of procuring a picture of Malkmus’ tongue, so he can better nail the flat Central Valley Cali accent? Or to set up a fake for-your-consideration screener of a fake biopic, so Oscar voters can see Jason Schwartzman’s fake Chris Lombardi yell, “The band that ruined Lollapalooza… Is that what you want your legacy to be!?”
But he still gives you a sense of who these guys were, why they mattered, and how Malkmus and Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg’s experiments in lo-fi recording helped revolutionize what we’ll gingerly call “alternative rock.” If that dynamic duo — along with Nastanovich, bassist Mark Ibold, and drummer Steve West — were simply human scare quotes with Fender Strats and an ability to change styles every five minutes, they’d be a nostalgic novelty filed next to King Missile and that “this car is like punk rock” commercial. As anyone who saw them in 2022 can attest, Pavement remains a great band worthy of a great documentary. They now have one, and they can rest easy knowing that it takes their music as seriously as they do, and takes the idea of a “great” rock band as a goof like they do. The cake-and-eat-it-too approach is the only shady lane worth going down with them.
The whole band was present for the NYFF premiere, and joined Perry and editor Robert Greene onstage at Lincoln Center for a postscreening Q&A. True to form, it featured a few snarky digs (asked why Perry was approached, Ibold replied, “The Safdie brothers said no?”), many awkward silences, and Nastanovich stepping in to get the party started. They all seemed to approve of the documentary-slash-avant-garde-performance-art project, though you get the sense they’d be more comfortable with their instruments onstage. Given the way the band aggressively ambled through their show at Sony Hall the night before, working their way through a career-spanning set in a venue as small as the Cavern Club and twice as sweaty, a concert is truly the way they like to interact with the public. Even with the less-than-stellar sound system, their takes on “Box Elder,” “Zurich Is Stained,” “Two States” (Scott Kannberg: good guitarist, great middle-aged-dad dancer), and “Conduit for Sale!” featured the exact kind of carefully synchronized sloppiness that makes those Pavement songs feel like yours, and yours alone.
Some folks noted the Eras-like set list, however, and seized on an offhand remark that Malkmus made after a rousing rendition of “Harness Your Hopes,” a.k.a. the B-side turned unexpected TikTok phenomenon. “That’s the end of our career,” Malkmus said, before exiting stage right. He might have been referring to the chronology of their choices for the evening, given that they kicked off the set with 1989’s “You’re Killing Me” and ended with a 1999 song recently reclaimed for the 21st century. Others thought that this signaled one more farewell among many, and that they were ready to put Pavement to bed permanently. They returned for an encore — “Date With Ikea” and “Fight This Generation” — then left. Maybe it is the end. They got a great victory lap. Goodnight to the rock & roll era, indeed.
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