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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.
Wall Street Journal
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘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.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Pavement's Hybrid Doc-Biopic Gets Official Trailer: Watch
The post Pavement's Hybrid Doc-Biopic Gets Official Trailer: Watch appeared first on Consequence. Pavements, Alex Ross Perry's experimental biopic-documentary on the band Pavement, has received its first official trailer. Arriving in theaters around the US on June 6th, Pavements combines elements of the traditional musical biopic with that of a rock documentary. The film captures all five members of Pavement in 2022 as they launched their reunion tour, their own museum, and a musical based on their catalogue. All the while, Joe Keery stars as frontman Stephen Malkmus in a fictitious documenting of the band's history, alongside fellow actor/musician performers Jason Schwartzman, Nat Wolff, Tim Heidecker, Zoe Lister-Jones, and more. This biopic-style presentation of the band's origins story was captured as Range Life: A Pavement Story, which is both its own separate companion movie as well as the 'film within a film' portion of Pavements. Range Life received its first trailer earlier this month, though it does not have a confirmed release date; the trailer ends suggesting that Range Life will be released on its own around Christmas 2025. True to Pavement's lore-heavy exploration of satire, meta-humor, and subversive aesthetics, Pavements advances upon the traditional rock-doc format through its hybrid musical/biopic/documentary style, seemingly parodying all three styles of filmmaking. Initially, Malkmus requested that a Pavement film be made not by a documentarian, but a 'screenwriter who would not write a screenplay.' Perry then signed on to craft Pavements, attempting to make something 'legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, and illogical.' After two years of post-production, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and New York Film Festival in 2024. Pavement have teased a new song arriving as part of the film's official soundtrack, marking the band's first new music offering in over 20 years — though the band's Scott Kannberg described it as 'not a big deal.' Revisit our list of the band's 10 best songs. Pavement's Hybrid Doc-Biopic Gets Official Trailer: Watch Paolo Ragusa Popular Posts Members of British Punk Band UK Subs Detained and Denied Entry into US Dolly Parton Gave Rules to Sabrina Carpenter for "Please Please Please" Rework Documentary Claims Jim Morrison Is Alive, Living in Syracuse Drake's Lawyers Say "Millions of People" Believe Kendrick Lamar's Pedophile Claim In 2025, Lollapalooza Has Shed Its Rock Past for Good A Definitive Ranking of Every Disney Live-Action Remake Subscribe to Consequence's email digest and get the latest breaking news in music, film, and television, tour updates, access to exclusive giveaways, and more straight to your inbox.
