'Pavements' review: A slanted, enchanting documentary-biopic-prank

Every band has its biggest fans. The '90s slacker/alt rock group Pavement is probably the greatest, most vital musical group in existence to someone, but right from its opening frames, Alex Ross Perry's Pavements deflates the grandeur of this idea, sarcastically overstating the band’s stature in its opening text. In an age of musical biopic plenty, this semi-ironic, postmodern take — which runs through Perry's part drama, part documentary, and part mockumentary — may be just what the doctor ordered.

To those with only passing knowledge of the Stockton, California, rockers — Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Scott Kannberg, Steve West, and Mark Ibold — this approach to the band’s concert footage may seem counterproductive, but it also perfectly embodies their lackadaisical, experimental facade. The unique form of Perry's film has its strengths and drawbacks. However, like Pavement itself, what sets the film apart is its outright refusal to adhere to tradition. It is, for better or worse, unique.

What is Pavements about?

Through split screens that contrast the group's late-'90s breakup with its 2022 reunion, Pavements establishes a sense of visual and narrative duality early on. While the film eventually chronicles the lives of its members (and the band's life as a whole) in slightly more linear fashion, this contrast establishes what appear to be the film's dramatic parameters: an early success story later granted a new lease on life. However, the strange nature of the band’s revival soon begins fading into view, revealing just how idiosyncratic this movie truly is.

Much of the movie unfolds in side-by-side split screen, which has become a common technique in musical docs, from Todd Haynes’ Rothko-inspired The Velvet Underground to the self-generating, new-each-time Eno. However, Pavements uses this visual cue for tongue-in-cheek purpose early on. On one side, the band’s frontman Stephen Malkmus espouses his youthful, perhaps naive philosophies in a decades-old video. On the other, actor Joe Keery (Steve Harrington on Stranger Things) begins reciting the very same words, with remarkably similar intonations. This reveals — amusingly, and acerbically — that the movie's real subjects exist alongside fictitious versions of them, a group of young actors (including the likes of Nat Wolff and Griffin Newman) who have been cast in a film called Range Life, a prestige biopic practically designed to win awards.

The doc veers between presenting the making of this satirical project and presenting it as a movie within a movie, whose footage is sprinkled sporadically throughout Pavements (rife with its own “For Your Consideration” watermark, as though it were a screener for award voting). Perry really did direct and exhibit this feature-length, Bohemian Rhapsody–style satire in New York last year — starring seasoned performers like Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker in biopic stock roles, like the band’s manager and a record executive — with the intention of including this premiere footage in the documentary. 

Soon, Pavements begins documenting not just the band themselves, but the development of three parallel art projects that go hand in hand with the band’s recent reunion: the aforementioned movie, a museum installation dedicated to the group, and Slanted! Enchanted!, a Broadway-style jukebox musical starring Michael Esper and Zoe Lister-Jones that pulls from the band's discography.

Pavements takes a multifaceted approach to its subjects.

The film cuts between its four aforementioned trajectories — the band and its performance, the biopic and its making, the museum, and the show, each with its own dedicated, roughly equal screen time — with reckless abandon. However, these subjects can be paired up along two interesting axes. On one hand, old footage of the band, when contrasted with their museum commemoration, serves to contrast the past and present, and eventually creates a chronology, albeit non-chronologically. On the other hand, the biopic project is tongue-in-cheek, as though it were more about the biopic genre than about Pavement themselves, and thus, it embodies the group's ironic musings. But this could not feel more different from the musical theater project, which draws from the group's lyrics and melodies to create a sincere story (this show also really did premiere, in 2022).

While Pavements might seem like it meanders for the first of its two hours, cutting rapidly between these four trajectories helps weave together a complete fabric — about the band's story then and now, and about the conflict between their approach and the meaning behind their work. While watching the movie, you may not feel like you're learning anything about the group or its members, but all that really means is you aren't learning things according to the linear, straightforward language that most music docs and biopics have established.

However, the film's most entertaining segments are undoubtedly those featuring Keery, which chronicle his fictitious preparation process in meticulous detail. More than anything or anyone in Pavements, the actor seems to embody the group's spirit through his Borat-like pranks, in which he sits down with accent coaches to prepare for his role as Malkmus and meets up with various people he thinks might be able to help him stay in character. Fittingly, the only music film Pavements resembles in any fashion is Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.

What does Pavements actually have to say about the band Pavement?

The film, amidst its head-spinning montage approach, goes to ludicrous lengths with its movie-in-a-movie, all but presenting it in full during its runtime. However, this extended lark isn't really about the band, per se, the way the other segments are — none of which are individually sufficient to make any viewer a Pavement expert. Beyond a few dates and events, you're unlikely to come away from Pavements knowing much more about its members and their college disc jockey days than when you went in, which understandably elicits the question: "What's the point?"

The point, it would seem, lies in the making of the film itself, as an anti-biopic that runs counter to everything a standard Hollywood biopic is — or rather, what it represents. If Pavement was an anti-institution band, then Pavements is its anti-institution movie made with their participation. In presenting a hilariously schmaltzy vision of what a straightforward biopic might have looked like, Perry helps them avoid an overly serious canonization.

In a way, he helps keep them young. Bands, when they reach a certain age or threshold, become nostalgic cover acts for themselves, and Pavements is determined to prevent this from happening at all costs, even if it means crafting a movie on the verge of avant-garde that might alienate half its audience.

Still, even when the various narrative threads in Pavements start to meander, the movie remains an entrancing sensory experience, given just how much screen time is dedicated to performance footage, both real and re-created. At the end of the day, despite the tricks and pranks Perry pulls, he knows full well that the reason people show up to musical biopics in the first place — and the reason they're made to begin with — is music that connects with people's sensibilities. This, he delivers in spades, all while maintaining a reverence for Pavement by being, well, irreverent.

Pavements was reviewed out of its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival.