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Los Angeles Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Pavements' takes lovable liberties with the facts, delivering a '90s indie-rock band in full
By way of introduction, 'Pavements,' director Alex Ross Perry's experimental hybrid documentary about the '90s indie-rock paragons Pavement, refers to the group as 'The World's Most Important and Influential Band,' a label that seems intended to embarrass them and their self-effacing lead singer, Stephen Malkmus. Pavement was never U2 or Nirvana. Nothing about them suggests a term as grandiose as 'important,' much less stirs the soul like Kurt Cobain, whose nakedly personal lyrics are a far cry from Malkmus's high-end refrigerator magnet poetry, with its witty wordplay and off-kilter juxtapositions. And yet, let us whisper this part as quietly as possible: Perry sincerely believes in Pavement's era-defining greatness. And with 'Pavements,' he's made a film that nobly and triumphantly searches for a way to capture the band's essence. That doesn't mean he finds it easily, because the rough edges of this story could never be buffed out into a biopic like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or an hour-long episode of VH1's 'Behind the Music.' What Perry has achieved here is perhaps best expressed by the name of Pavement's 1992 breakthrough album, 'Slanted and Enchanted.' It's hard to guess how non-fans might find their way through 'Pavements,' because even devotees will need to find their footing in this conceptual cat-herding project, which patches together a thumbnail history of the band through several distinct angles at once. In the present day, Perry documents the lead-up to the band's robust 2022 reunion tour, only the second time they've hit the road together since their unceremonious breakup in the year 2000. (Scott Kannberg, Pavement's second guitarist and vocalist known as 'Spiral Stairs,' remembers being so cash-strapped before a 2010 reunion that he was about to take a job as a Seattle bus driver.) Though Malkmus has maintained much of his lean, boyish West Coast cool, even edging toward late middle age, the quintet looks older and wiser, no longer burdened by their uncomfortable relationship with success. Pavement burned out like any other rock band, but a conventional rise-and-fall treatment wouldn't suit them. Folding their history and legacy on top of each other like the layers of a choux pastry, Perry and his editor, the documentary filmmaker Robert Greene, combine the tour footage with three other events, each building a piece of whimsical mythology. First, there's Pavements 1933-2002, an international exhibition that features artwork, Malkmus' old notebooks and other ephemera, like a clipped toenail from original drummer Gary Young. Then there's two staged endeavors, an off-Broadway musical called 'Slanted! Enchanted!' and a faux-Hollywood biopic titled 'Range Life,' featuring a cast of recognizable young faces, led by 'Stranger Things'' Joe Keery as Malkmus. Pavement never quite penetrated the mainstream, but Perry frees himself to imagine the band as a platinum-selling cultural force, even if he has to rewrite their history by hand. Though 'Pavements' doesn't like to linger in one place very long, it does patch together a rough chronology of the band's history from its suburban roots in Stockton, Calif., to its primordial iterations at the University of Virginia to the early singles and EPs that led to five full-length albums that spanned the 1990s. Perry and Greene let specific cultural moments speak for themselves: a humbling tour opening for Sonic Youth, Malkmus taking shots at Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in 'Range Life,' Beavis and Butt-Head making fun of the video for 'Rattled by the Rush' and a miserable afternoon slot at Lollapalooza 1995, when one bored crowd in West Virginia started slinging mud at them. But 'Pavements' does its best to yada-yada through the bullet points and spend as much time as possible spinning fantasies. To that end, the behind-the-scenes clips that Perry offers of his Pavement musical are the most delightful in the movie, just for the counterintuitive thrill of watching theater kids sing and dance through a catalog that would seem to defy their essential earnestness. To hear a low-key, evocative track like 1997's 'Fin' performed by a stage full of pristine vocalists validates Perry's belief that Malkmus' songs 'can transcend their original form.' You find yourself laughing over a montage of fresh-faced zoomers trying their hand at lyrics like 'You can never quarantine the past,' and then you might admit, with equal astonishment, that it actually sounds great. By contrast, the movie-within-a-movie, 'Range Life,' isn't a movie at all, but a ruse that turns into an elaborate parody of Method acting. Perry frees himself to explore the process of simply preparing for a role in the abstract, not unlike Greene's 2016 documentary 'Kate Plays Christine,' which followed a real-life actor, Kate Lyn Sheil, as she researched the tragic life of newscaster Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself on air. To play the famously enigmatic Malkmus, Kerry goes to great and often hilariously absurd lengths to pin the man down, including a couple of visits to the Whitney Museum, where Malkmus once worked as a security guard, and on a quest to take a photograph of the singer's tongue to better capture the mechanics of his 'vocal fry.' Gazing at an iPhone shot of the inside of Malkmus' mouth, Kerry solemnly remarks, 'All the work that I've been doing comes from this place.' At a little over two hours long, 'Pavements' can feel a little like the band's notoriously misshapen 1995 opus 'Wowee Zowee,' a double album with only three sides. Yet the perfectly imperfect shape of 'Pavements' is similarly tailored to those who appreciate the band's creative unruliness. It also feels like an apt companion to Perry's last fiction feature, 2018's 'Her Smell,' which strongly alludes to the life of Hole lead singer Courtney Love and pays off a chaotic two-hour drama with a breathtakingly lovely final act. Hole and Pavement shared that main-stage lineup at Lollapalooza '95 — Love got to play at night to a more engaged crowd — and between these two films, Perry has told a prismatic story of the 'Alternative Nation' decade, when figures as disparate as Love and Malkmus were affecting the same generation. They may not have overlapped comfortably, but Perry picks up on their harmonies. Yet there's still a vast distance between Love's raw, arena-friendly confessionals and Malkmus' jagged phrasing and artful deconstruction. 'Pavements' is essential nonsense, preserving the band's enigmatic allure through the same mix of irony and misdirection. It slips pleasingly through your grasp.
New York Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Pavements': A Sly Ode to the Last Band You'd Give the Biopic Treatment
Everybody thinks they know their favorite musicians or bands inside and out: what the lyrics mean, when their style changed, which fabled event made or broke their careers. Filmmakers have always been willing participants in the process, from concert movies to intimate documentaries to glossy biopics. We crave the results, because the myth-weaving is collaborative. And sometimes it involves bending reality a bit to get a better story. Nominally, the subject of the eccentric new documentary 'Pavements' (in theaters) is, well, Pavement — but in truth, it's about the whole ecosystem that creates the legend. The 1990s indie-rock band reached moderate fame in its prime, broke up in 1999, and reunited for tours in 2010 and 2022, which is where 'Pavements' begins. The band has a lot of lasting fans, mostly people old enough to have gone to shows or listened on their local college station during Pavement's original run. There are also a lot of people who've never heard of it. That makes the band an unlikely subject for a documentary, which is kind of the joke — and which lends 'Pavements' its bigger theme, too. Directed by Alex Ross Perry and edited by the documentarian Robert Greene, it's a hard film to describe. Part spoof and part serious, its vibe is very much in keeping with its subjects. There's the documentary part, about the band's formation and various albums, with archival footage and interviews, a format familiar to anyone who watches documentaries these days. But there are at least three other things going on inside this movie, shot by the cinematographer Robert Kolodny in a variety of visual styles designed to recall genres we've seen before. We watch the creation and rehearsal process for 'Slanted! Enchanted!,' a Pavement jukebox musical that culminated in two workshop performances in New York in 2022 (one of which I attended). We see the opening of a museum-style show with memorabilia. And woven into this is footage that purports to be a behind-the-scenes look at the making of 'Range Life,' a Hollywood-style biopic about the band. The main focus is Joe Keery (from 'Stranger Things'), who is cast as the Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus and spends much of his time engaging in increasingly goofy attempts to 'get inside' the head of the almost comically laid-back Malkmus. This footage is obviously poking fun at musician biopics like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and 'Elvis' — at one point, Keery complains to a vocal coach that he can't seem to get rid of Malkmus's vocal fry, and the 'screenwriters' are constantly inventing heightened moments. 'Range Life' does not exist, though there are scenes 'from' it in the film, sometimes shown in split-screen with actual archival footage of the moment being depicted. And while 'Slanted! Enchanted!' did get a stage production, it hasn't reached Broadway yet. The museum show did happen — though some of what's in it is fabricated, including a few fake ads for Apple and Absolut Vodka that the band very much did not shoot — but everyone in attendance seems a little dazed and confused about it, including the band. Mush all these pieces together with archival video of interviews with the musicians (in which, at times, they just make stuff up), and lace it with occasional glimpses of the crew of 'Pavements' making the film, and the effect is delightfully destabilizing. At some point we lose track of whether anything in here is real at all, or whether maybe it all is. That's sort of the point. The art created around an artist — a musical, an exhibition or most definitely a film — memorializes and mythologizes, and the story takes on a life of its own. The low-key and never very mainstream Pavement seems like the last band that would get this treatment, and that's the joke. But it also makes the band the perfect subject for what 'Pavements' is slyly doing, and quite brilliantly, too.
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Pavements' Blurs Fact and Fiction to Reimagine a Band's Legacy
The Bob Dylan Center gathered some 6,000 items from the musician's archive in an Oklahoma museum. Green Day's 'American Idiot' album was adapted into a Broadway show. The Queen biopic 'Bohemian Rhapsody' won four Oscars and was nominated for best picture. If these artists could burnish their legacies and become part of a wider cultural conversation outside of music, then why not Pavement, the beloved '90s indie-rock band that was about to reunite for its first concerts since 2010? That's the animating spirit behind 'Pavements,' the director Alex Ross Perry's audacious documentary about the band, which opens Friday. Perry did, in fact, write and direct a stage show called 'Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical' that played for two nights in Manhattan in 2022. A museum touting 'rumored relics of the band's real and imagined history' popped up in TriBeCa that fall, coinciding with the initial Brooklyn run of the group's (very real, and very successful) reunion tour. And Perry filmed portions of a fictionalized Pavement biopic — starring Joe Keery ('Stranger Things'), Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker, among others — then staged a 'premiere' for it in Brooklyn. In 'Pavements,' all of this is intercut with archival imagery from the band's history and footage from the reunion tour's rehearsals and performances, sometimes presented in two-, three- or even four-way split screen. (The plural title is quite literal.) Overall, the effect is about as far from the typical rock documentary as you could get. 'I was told, 'They want nothing traditional,'' Perry said in a video interview last month, adding that the group's frontman, Stephen Malkmus, texted him, ''Avoid the legacy trap.' Possibly in all capitals.' At this point in the life cycle of Pavement or any other band, Perry said, the question becomes: What else do we do with our story? A documentary, a series, an exhibition, what? 'So that, for me, became the actual text of the movie,' he said. In a phone interview last week, Malkmus said that Perry's pitch was 'a little less risk-averse' and seemed like it would lead to a more interesting film: 'You don't want it to be a hagiography of just perfection and coolness, you know?' Malkmus and the guitarist Scott Kannberg, known as Spiral Stairs, formed Pavement in the late 1980s in suburban Stockton ('the Cleveland of California,' as Malkmus puts it in the movie). Gary Young, who ran a recording studio there, joined as a drummer and all-around chaos agent before being replaced by Steve West; the band's other members are Mark Ibold, on bass, and Bob Nastanovich, who provides percussion, keyboards and extreme enthusiasm. The most straightforward parts of 'Pavements' trace the band's rise, never to mainstream fame but at least to indie-rock renown, opening for Sonic Youth and facing 'next big thing' expectations in the wake of the acclaim for 'Slanted and Enchanted,' the group's 1992 breakthrough album, and the meteoric success of Nirvana. They were expectations that a band like Pavement probably never could have met, but the group earned a reputation for tanking its chances, or at least being indifferent to them. (It was the peak Gen X slacker era, after all.) Even Beavis and Butt-Head took potshots: 'They need to try harder!' Angst over this dynamic forms the dramatic core, such as it is, of 'Range Life,' the fake Pavement biopic that stars Keery as a bratty Malkmus. It's the documentary's most overtly satirical segment — Perry says the musical theater section is a completely earnest experiment — and mainly seems aimed at skewering Hollywood re-creations like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and 'A Complete Unknown.' During overheated moments, melodramatic music swells, and 'For Your Consideration' titles appear onscreen. 'The Bob Dylan movie is not good or fun,' Perry said, adding that 'if it was 30 minutes, I think it would be as watchable as 30 minutes of Joe Keery playing Malkmus. But the problem is these things are often over two hours long.' Scenes of Keery dreaming of Oscar buzz and preparing for his 'Range Life' role drip with deadpan humor. He visits the Whitney Museum's former home on Madison Avenue for inspiration (Malkmus and West worked there as guards), and sees a vocal coach to try to nail the singer's California accent. 'I feel like it would be possible to get a picture of Stephen's tongue,' Keery suggests in the movie. 'It would be super helpful to know what it looks like.' Malkmus said he found Keery's portrayal funny, even if much of the biopic is poking at him 'more than most people would be comfortable.' 'Probably some of my friends would say that I'm getting trolled a bit, but I think you just have to say in the end that that's because, like, I'm rad,' Malkmus said, laughing. One real incident dramatized in 'Range Life,' when Pavement walked offstage early at Lollapalooza in 1995 after the crowd in West Virginia pelted the band with mud, has a crossover moment in the Pavement museum, where the musicians' purported clothes from the gig — still muddy! — are on display. The entire museum was initially going to be that type of put-on, Perry said, but the euphoric reaction to the reunion-tour shows, along with the unexpected viral success of the obscure Pavement B-side 'Harness Your Hopes,' led him to realize that 'this has to basically be celebratory in a genuine way.' 'The real world had become the fiction of the movie,' Perry said, and his ironic conceit of Pavement being a huge band everyone knew was seeming less like a conceit. He cited the Malkmus joke in 'Barbie' as another 'you can't make this stuff up' example. Still, some of the museum's exhibits weren't real; Pavement never won a V.M.A. or did an Absolut Vodka ad. (Let's hope the 'Gary Young toenail' was fake, too.) And within the prankish world created by the production, not everyone was in on the joke. Some attendees of the ersatz 'Range Life' premiere in Brooklyn, where about 60 minutes of mock footage, screen tests and table reads was shown, thought they had seen an early cut of 'Pavements' and pronounced it terrible. 'It's time to set the record straight on this and shut up all of these babies on Pavement Reddit,' Perry said when asked about the confusion. Reactions to the actual 'Pavements' were largely positive when it made the film festival rounds last year, including a premiere at Venice and a New York Film Festival slot. The New York Times critic Alissa Wilkinson called it 'terrifically strange and entertaining.' But some viewers have been left more bewildered. A review in The Hollywood Reporter maintained that the movie would hold little appeal for non-die-hards. Perry said that while 'Pavements' is focused on one band, it also explores more universal themes of legacy and music history. 'I think they are the most fascinating text you can study if you want to study every single question about music in the 1990s,' he said of the band. When Pavement played a show in Manhattan on the eve of the movie's New York Film Festival debut in October, digging deep into its back catalog more than two years after the reunion tour started, the release of 'Pavements' seemed like it might mark the close of one of the band's most successful chapters. But Malkmus said it's still open. 'Things are alive in Pavement,' he said. 'We get offers to play shows, and we consider them — it's hard not to. People really like you, and we like each other, and we're getting older and we should do it while we can.' And though Perry said that his concept could apply to any long-lived band ('you could do a Weezer musical'), it seems perfectly suited to the group that sang, 'You've been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life.' 'Pavement are slippery,' he said. 'They're many things to many people.'
