Pavement has always been a band of uneven proportions. Forever on the precipice of the big time, the group never appeared to try hard enough, to want to be understood enough, and their creative output—off-kilter indie rock that sounded both revolutionary and unintentional—was always a little too much.
They helped define a decade of independent music, but couldn’t seem to move past fringe notoriety. Part earnest experimenters, actively working against the mainstream, and part saints of slackerdom, to whom fans have built deeply ironic reliquaries, Pavement meant something to many, and everything to some.
As Jason Schwartzman says to actors playing the band—in Range Life, the mock biopic that makes up one fourth of Alex Ross Perry’s prismatic new music doc, Pavements—“I know you want to give that 100 percent of that 50 percent you think you might be able to give.”
Schwartzman is an approximation of Chris Lombardi, co-founder of Pavement’s label Matador; the character’s vaguely Pavement-like lyrical turn comes at a drama's traditionally climactic scene. Though we only see snippets of Range Life, its tone and timbre suggest the hackneyed plot beats and emotional shorthand of award season fodder. Pavement lead guitarist Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs, played earnestly by Nat Wolff) loudly chides aloof lead singer Stephen Malkmus (Joe Keery, eyes permanently half open) for being too damn aloof, and a chyron appears in the screen’s bottom third, reading "For Your Consideration," a phrase synonymous with Oscar bait.
Keery almost too perfectly embodies Stephen Malkmus, blessed with the same arch sense of humor and unflustered sense of quiet as the frontman; it’s impossible to tell whether anything that comes out of his mouth is serious or not. We witness the Stranger Things actor going full method as he prepares, studying with a vocal coach to match Malkmus’s fried northern California syllables and even musing about getting nominated for something.
It’s clear Perry thinks this biopic shit sucks, and his team is in on the joke. Frozen in the contrails of contrived fare like A Complete Unknown, Pavements contends with the illusion of what a typical drama about Pavement would look like. Between what the band aspired to be—or not to be—and what the music industry expected from them, between what they were and who their fans fantasized they were, Pavements thrives, conflating indie rock myth with record industry reality.
Related: A Complete Unknown Satisfies Only Your Lowest Expectations for a Bob Dylan Biopic
It’s true: Pavements is a documentary about Pavement, and it explores the band's birth in the late '80s (as Malkmus and Spiral were in and out of bands with their friend, a pre-Silver-Jews David Berman), the departure of the group's first drummer and consummate headstander Gary Young, and into the last five years or so of their initial time together, when it felt like they were in an extended break-up.
We relive their history in luxuriously obsolete media: hours of MTV video interviews where hosts fail to explicate the band’s appeal, performances caught on 16 mm film, and the loose ephemera of a pre-social media landscape that pulls greedily from Lance Bangs’ 2002 Pavement doc Slow Century.
And because Bangs' Pavement documentary already exists, Pavements must be more. It’s a concert doc too, Perry and cinematographer Robert Kolodny chronicling the band’s rehearsals in Portland and their successive 2022 reunion tour with new member Rachel Cole. It’s also a museum piece about a museum piece, giving a glimpse of the opening of Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum, replete with song covers from a hip coterie of folks, like Soccer Mommy and Speedy Ortiz reworking essentials like “Here,” “Unfair,” “Cream of Gold,” and of course “Gold Soundz,” which Pitchfork inaugurated as the best song of the '90s, for millennials who had only absorbed the band’s importance ambiently up to that point.
What point is that? Pavements begins at the beginning and also at the end, flattening the past three decades to explore how the band has come to embrace, or at least accept, what kind of monolith their legend erected in their wake.
Then Pavements further complicates itself. In 2022, Perry, composer Keegan DeWitt, and an ensemble of off-Broadway and theater pros, mounted a Pavement jukebox musical—Slanted! Enchanted!, which the documentary details in full, capped by its two-night limited run.
Biopic, doc, concert, museum, musical—Pavements consists of five through lines winding around one another, not quite equal and far from reasonable. The film is a beautiful hat on a hat.
According to producer and editor Robert Greene, this is intentional. In several interviews, Greene has declared he’s a mega-fan of Pavement and that his favorite album is Wowee Zowee. That happens to be the album cycle on which Range Life is focused; it's worth noting that Pavements, like Wowee Zowee, is probably 20 minutes too long and has more than one ending.
Though Greene has edited four of Perry’s films, including made-up 2018 biopic Her Smell, Pavements represents something deeper between the two, something intramuscular. In Greene’s obsessive hands—reportedly editing the film over the course of a year and a half, bringing in beloved local figure Bangs to aid in crafting the film’s final cut—Pavements is a pretty astounding feat of collage.
Greene’s fandom cannot be overstated as a force of good. How he uses “Grounded” to bring the five narrative threads to a point, layering performance upon performance—evoking the methods of the filmmakers who contributed to Pavement’s identity or subliminally influenced it, not just Bangs but James Herbert, Jem Cohen, and even Stan Brakhage—is suddenly, in the middle of this jubilantly wry exploration of a jubilantly wry band, very viscerally moving.
There's one shot of Stephen Malkmus in the middle of a staged Q&A—after the staged premiere of aforementioned non-real Pavement biopic—that is so suddenly sad and funny and limned with startlingly cinematic light that I gasped, and however Perry got that moment out of him, however much actual historical documentation is there, doesn't matter.
Because in its cornucopia of perspectives—apportioned like a cubist expression of the band in their massive totality—Pavements is less an attempt to grasp why Pavement is loved than how, coming to terms with what it means to make a movie about a band at all. We attach narratives to haircuts, fasten drama to the general exhaustion of life, or even wish their albums were spectacularly arranged jukebox musicals rather than the ramshackle burners they actually were.
In “Embassy Row” Malkmus requests, “Come on now, give us a grade: A for effort, and a B for delivery, C for devotion when the world starts encroachin’ on your plans.” Pavement was never insincere, far from it. But maybe the ways we’ve loved them always were.
Pavements premieres in Portland at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st, Thurs May 22, 7 pm, $12, tickets here. The May 22 screening features a Q&A with Lance Bangs, producer Arrow Kruse, producer-editor Robert Greene, and band member Rebecca Cole. Subsequent showtimes vary and can be found at cinema21.com.
