‘Pavements' Review: Alex Ross Perry's Aptly Ironic Tribute
Director Alex Ross Perry's new movie is about, according to an opening title, 'The world's most important and influential band.' The Beatles? Nay. The Beach Boys? Of course not. The Velvet Underground? Wrong again! No, the band in question is the '90s slacker-rock outfit Pavement. No, Mr. Perry isn't serious. Or maybe he is?
His film, 'Pavements,' is a Möbius strip of a music documentary, at once ardent in its affections and devilishly ironic in how it treats the norms of paying tribute. It's an approach fit for the subjects, punky and critically beloved Gen Xers with a horror of selling out who would as soon do a DraftKings commercial as be the focus of a silver-screen hagiography. And so one of the more plainly satirical elements here is the production of just such a burnished biopic. We get a behind-the-scenes look at the (fake) film, 'Range Life,' directed by Mr. Perry and starring, in the role of frontman Stephen Malkmus, the 'Stranger Things' actor Joe Keery, digging deep in search of Oscar gold.
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