Alex Ross Perry on his Pavement documentary: ‘The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum'

Irish Times

07-07-2025

More than 16 years into his film-making career,
Alex Ross Perry
can shake the most algorithm-trodden viewers out of their complacency. His unapologetically caustic, literary milieu, populated by spiky, self-absorbed humans, remains defiantly indie, made on modest budgets, with zero concessions towards 'relatable' entertainment norms.
In
Listen Up Philip
, from 2014, Jason Schwartzman plays a misanthropic novelist who alienates everyone around him. In Her Smell, playing Becky Something, Elisabeth Moss delivers a ferocious performance as a volatile, drug-addled punk rocker. In the earlier
Queen of Earth
, Moss excelled as a grieving woman descending into paranoia.
The film-maker's devoted following intersects with that of Paul Schrader, John Cassavetes and the American authors Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth.
Pavements, Perry's new hybrid documentary portrait of Pavement, indie rock's least-bothered legacy act, is a thrillingly maximalist curveball from an auteur with such a disciplined, character-driven oeuvre. It's a world away from those films that Perry's cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, has described as 'people talking in rooms'.
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'You hope that everything you create will be a new process, no matter what,' says Perry. 'You're looking for that every time in some way or another. But, by definition, there are 40 primary characters in Pavements whom you're keeping track of. That is extremely rare and complicated – except for movies like Nashville [directed by Robert Altman, from 1975].
'The movie is actually really several smaller movies. The challenge was making little tiny movies that fit into a bigger movie. I wanted to make something complicated and unprecedented.'
Nearly 35 years after a band of self-styled slackers from Stockton, California, emerged with a batch of lo-fi, inscrutable songs, Pavement remain an outlier in American indie rock.
They were never meant for the mainstream. Formed in 1989 by
Stephen Malkmus
and Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs), Pavement began as a studio experiment of distorted guitars and nebulous mumbling. They sold self-distributed cassettes and secured some basement shows.
They scored an unexpected success with their much-loved album Slanted and Enchanted from 1992, but their jagged sound and nonsensical lyrics would never truly go mainstream.
'I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who's not that successful in their time tries to think that,' says Malkmus early in Perry's film, a documentary that occasionally gives you the sense that you're watching the biggest act on the planet.
A lot is going on. An anchoring timeline chronicles the band's 2022 reunion tour – their first since 2010 – featuring rehearsals and performances from dates across North America and Europe. Off-Broadway, hopefuls audition for Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical. A pop-up Pavement museum, ostentatiously titled Pavements 1933–2022, features authentic artefacts and apparent fakes.
There's more chicanery in Range Life: A Pavement Story, fragments of a grandiloquent Hollywood biopic filmed within the film, starring Joe Keery as Malkmus, with Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi, founder of Matador Records, the band's long-time label. There is even a completely made-up awards-season denouement, featuring Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
It's an epic sprawl that came together surprisingly quickly following an approach by Matador. Lombardi pitched the idea, with Malkmus giving a clear directive: they didn't want a typical documentary or a scripted screenplay. The frontman's only note was a request for something 'confusing and weird'.
'Within six weeks of being contacted to come up with some sort of radical or unusual idea that could be a suitably unique Pavement movie, all of those strands were there,' says Perry.
'When I look at my early documents, the only thing in my notes that is not in the movie is a fictionalised art-house film – I had the idea that, in addition to a very cliched, silly, bad Hollywood movie, there would be an art film like Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins. All of the ideas were there from the outset. My first thought was the movie ought to be a mosaic.'
In 1999, after a decade that had seen them have moderate hits with Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz and Range Life, Pavement broke up with the same shrugs they brought to their live performances. They had sung and played off-key during shambolic television appearances. Their inclusion on the bill of the Lollapalooza festival in 1995 – an odd fit alongside Sonic Youth, Hole, Cypress Hill, Sinéad O'Connor, Beck and Coolio – almost started a riot.
Do Pavement fit Perry's description of his most acerbic creations as 'people who can't get out of their own way'?
'When I first heard Pavement as a young person, I had no understanding of the complexity of what an artist's goals are,' the film-maker says. 'You don't think about that stuff when you're 13. You're just hearing a good song and catching a concert. That level of insight is invisible to a lot of the public, and often only visible in hindsight.
'But it certainly became their story in the 20 years after they broke up. After the reunion it became the story of unfulfilled ambition and missed opportunities and untapped potential.
'During my research for the film, which was all done in 2020, deep into the pandemic, when nobody in the band had seen each other since the 2010 reunion tour, the narratives I was given by everyone involved with the band spoke to that disappointment.'
Then came a plot twist. Harness Your Hopes, an obscure track recorded in 1996, unexpectedly became one of the band's most popular songs. Despite never being released as a single or receiving significant radio play at the time, the track gained traction on Spotify in the 2010s – it now has more than 210 million streams – before igniting a dance craze on TikTok.
'At some point, making the movie, I looked at their Spotify page expecting to see Range Life or Cut Your Hair as their number-one songs. And suddenly I'm asking, 'Why does this song have tens of millions more views than everything else?'
'This song hasn't even been on my radar for narrative purposes. And then I googled it and discovered this crazy thing happened. By the time the band were rehearsing for the 2022 tour, this song had blown up and they were playing it as part of every show. I shot the video for it before we shot the movie.'
It is a delightful second act, not just for Pavement but for Pavements. Perry's grandiose, counterfactual account of the band now feels strangely prophetic.
'We made this movie over a five-year span,' he says. 'The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum. We weren't thinking, Oh, that'll be funny, because sooner or later they'll have gold records. It was, like, This is the most ridiculous thing imaginable, because they haven't been a band for 25 years. And now the movie is out and the success that had eluded them for forever has happened.'
Pavements is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th