Pavements review: Brilliantly unclassifiable salute to the 1990s indie-rock legends Pavement
Director
:
Alex Ross Perry
Cert
:
None
Genre
:
Documentary
Starring
:
Pavement, Rebecca Clay Cole, Gary Young, Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Tim Heidecker, Jason Schwartzman, Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones, Kathryn Gallagher
Running Time
:
2 hrs 6 mins
Alex Ross Perry
's Pavements is a love letter, a mischievous jape and a deconstructed rock documentary all at once, a brilliantly unclassifiable salute to the 1990s indie-rock legends Pavement that improbably juggles four separate projects (a documentary, a musical, an art exhibit and a fake biopic) into one shaggy, self-aware, mostly made-up opus. It shouldn't work. And yet this overstuffed eclair stays sweet.
Perry, whose coruscating Courtney Love-adjacent drama Her Smell demonstrated a keen faculty for musical chaos, pivots that instinct toward unbridled creative joy. The film is framed around Pavement's 2022 reunion tour, but it quickly spirals outwards into giddy metafiction.
Stranger Fiction's Joe Keery leans hilariously hard into method acting as the Pavement frontman,
Stephen Malkmus
, in the fictitious biopic Range Life. Real and fake artefacts are carefully curated into Pavements 1933–2022, a gallery show. Eager musical tryouts belt out Fin in an earnest, off-Broadway musical. These are not just grandiloquent gags. They slowly form portals into understanding the band's elusive slacker magic.
Pavement were never the 1990s sensation that Perry's film pretends. They mooned an irate Kentucky audience at Lollapalooza in 1995 and simply shrugged and walked away from one another in 1999.
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The inventive writer-director makes merry with that anti-arc, trading the bombast and preshadowing of traditional music biopics for something playful, generous and nonsensical. Pavements pokes fun at the genre's many cliches, from tortured-genius montages to melodramatic studio scenes, by re-enacting them with angular absurdity.
[
Alex Ross Perry on his Pavement documentary: 'The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum'
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That silliness never tips into snark or cynicism, whether it's Keery reverently photographing Malkmus's throat or the band reordering their set list for a bandmate's daughter.
Perry and his editor, Robert Greene (using split screens and collage techniques), build a dizzying kaleidoscope of timelines, earnestness and glee. What emerges is a film that's as formally adventurous and oddly affecting as the soundtrack. Pavement's songs, ever teetering between slacker irony and accidental profundity, land the film they richly deserve. And, with a pronounced irony that could only have originated with a Gen X joint, Perry's exaggerated trajectory is mirrored by the band's explosive recent popularity with Gen Z.
Pavements is on cinema release and, from Friday, July 11th, on Mubi
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