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.”
