The question Alex Ross Perry asked himself before embarking on the mad, four-faced project that is “Pavements” was: “What if Pavement was the most important band of all time?” It’s a fun idea, and Perry’s commitment to the bit cannot be questioned. An off-Broadway jukebox musical named after their breakthrough debut studio album “Slanted and Enchanted,” a fake “Bohemian Rhapsody”-style biopic starring Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman, a museum exhibition Perry helped devise and that brims with mostly unimportant memorabilia, and an actual documentary all exist in service of “Pavements.” If the assignment in making a film about Pavement was part sincere, part fuck-you, a dash of incoherent anti-establishment thought and a tablespoon of self-indulgence, “Pavements” understands it perfectly. Making a film about the band any other way seems like a complete waste of time.
Perry frames Pavement as a protest band, and that’s sort of true. Lead singer Stephen Malkmus and guitarist Scott Kannberg (more often known as “Spiral Stairs”) formed the band after college, eventually recruiting Bob Nastanovich, Mark Ibold, and, finally, Steve West, who replaced Gary Young on drums after their first album. Pavement were a college kid’s band, and they were certainly left of center (more recently, Malkmus has been a noisy Bernie Sanders supporter), but their lyrics were never really political. It’s hard to figure out, even now, what many are about. Seek deep subtext, and you’ll rarely find it. The manifesto didn’t matter, and Pavement didn’t stand for anything, just against It. The shrug was kind of the point.
In fact, Pavement’s biggest, most contentious targets were the more successful bands of the day, like The Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, and Oasis — a rivalry on which there’s new Twitter discourse. (Noel Gallagher said: “I still think bands should aim to be The Beatles, not fucking, I don’t know, Pavement.”)
What Pavement did do, as Perry’s film lays out in more subtle terms, was change the sound of American music. Their early albums are gnarly, punk, and grunge in equal measure, with the sort of technical quirks that Wilco would hone on “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” the album that ultimately closed the book on ’90s indie rock. American bands weren’t meant to sound like Pavement. West Coast bands certainly weren’t meant to — even if Malkmus declares that Stockton, in the Central Valley of California, is actually “the Cleveland” of its state.
Their nerdy, anti-masculine appeal prompted comparisons to Talking Heads at the time, and Malkmus as a lanky, smartly dressed, clean-shaven frontman with a soft voice and his head in the clouds made him an appropriate successor. And Joe Keery is perfectly “cast” as Malkmus in “Range Life,” the fake movie within this movie, and centered around Pavement’s apparent refusal to be successful. After 1994’s “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” (which spawned hit single “Cut Your Hair”) took Pavement as close to the cultural mainstream as they would ever find themselves, 1995’s “Wowee Zowee” was such a rejection it felt like a snub of what had made Pavement a success.
Keery and the rest of the band (who are played by Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, and Griffin Newman) meet their worn-out record label bosses, played by Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker. Malkmus can’t seem to explain why he doesn’t want to be famous. It all culminates in the disastrous 1995 Lollapalooza gig in West Virginia in which the band had lumps of mud and rocks thrown at them by an angry audience. The last “scene” has Keery writing a new song alone in their dressing room. (Though slacker icons, Pavement was strikingly productive during this period.)
It’s a genuinely moving moment that illustrates the external and internal challenges the band faced at this time better than the band’s descriptions (although these are worthwhile, too). Keery’s “performance” is a lot more than an impression: As he begins to play it Method, he starts to become Malkmus, a nod to Austin Butler’s apparently irreversible transformation into Elvis. Except instead of the wistful southern drawl, it’s Malkmus’s mumbly vocal fry that Keery can’t get rid of. “I’m starting to have regrets about making this film,” he says.
Meanwhile, “Slanted! Enchanted!,” the off-Broadway musical, brings out Pavement’s rare sincerity in the most heartfelt of art forms. The cast embraces the songs as entries to the American songbook, like “Show Boat,” and in this area, it’s not clear whether anyone quite realizes how funny this is. Perry manages to interview himself here, in the logical conclusion of the meta-ness of his project. Yet although unwieldy and incredibly ambitious — Perry says he spent almost a year working on the museum exhibition alone — “Pavements” has a pretty coherent understanding of what the band was all about and what they had to say. Considering that their elusiveness is part of their appeal, it’s pretty impressive.
Pavement might not have really been the most important band ever, but “Pavements” is an important documentary. It’s a reminder that the fourth (and fifth and sixth) wall can be smashed, that the rock doc can be reinvented. And that when the message is meta for meta’s sake, why not make the medium that way, too?
Grade: B+
“Pavements” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
