Each band has its greatest followers. The ’90s slacker/alt rock group Pavement might be the best, most significant musical group in existence to somebody, however proper from its opening frames, Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements deflates the grandeur of this concept, sarcastically overstating the band’s stature in its opening textual content. In an age of musical biopic lots, this semi-ironic, postmodern take — which runs via Perry’s half drama, half documentary, and half mockumentary — could also be simply what the physician ordered.
To these with solely passing information of the Stockton, California, rockers — Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Scott Kannberg, Steve West, and Mark Ibold — this method to the band’s live performance footage could appear counterproductive, nevertheless it additionally completely embodies their lackadaisical, experimental facade. The distinctive type of Perry’s movie has its strengths and downsides. Nevertheless, like Pavement itself, what units the movie aside is its outright refusal to stick to custom. It’s, for higher or worse, distinctive.
What’s Pavements about?
Via break up screens that distinction the group’s late-’90s breakup with its 2022 reunion, Pavements establishes a way of visible and narrative duality early on. Whereas the movie finally chronicles the lives of its members (and the band’s life as an entire) in barely extra linear style, this distinction establishes what seem like the movie’s dramatic parameters: an early success story later granted a brand new lease on life. Nevertheless, the unusual nature of the band’s revival quickly begins fading into view, revealing simply how idiosyncratic this film really is.
A lot of the film unfolds in side-by-side break up display screen, which has turn out to be a standard method in musical docs, from Todd Haynes’ Rothko-inspired The Velvet Underground to the self-generating, new-each-time Eno. Nevertheless, Pavements makes use of this visible cue for tongue-in-cheek function early on. On one facet, the band’s frontman Stephen Malkmus espouses his youthful, maybe naive philosophies in a decades-old video. On the opposite, actor Joe Keery (Steve Harrington on Stranger Issues) begins reciting the exact same phrases, with remarkably related intonations. This reveals — amusingly, and acerbically — that the film’s actual topics exist alongside fictitious variations of them, a gaggle of younger actors (together with the likes of Nat Wolff and Griffin Newman) who’ve been solid in a movie referred to as Vary Life, a status biopic virtually designed to win awards.
The doc veers between presenting the making of this satirical mission and presenting it as a film inside a film, whose footage is sprinkled sporadically all through Pavements (rife with its personal “For Your Consideration” watermark, as if it had been a screener for award voting). Perry actually did direct and exhibit this feature-length, Bohemian Rhapsody–type satire in New York final yr — starring seasoned performers like Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker in biopic inventory roles, just like the band’s supervisor and a document government — with the intention of together with this premiere footage within the documentary.
Quickly, Pavements begins documenting not simply the band themselves, however the improvement of three parallel artwork initiatives that go hand in hand with the band’s current reunion: the aforementioned film, a museum set up devoted 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 method to its topics.
The movie cuts between its 4 aforementioned trajectories — the band and its efficiency, the biopic and its making, the museum, and the present, every with its personal devoted, roughly equal display screen time — with reckless abandon. Nevertheless, these topics will be paired up alongside two fascinating axes. On one hand, outdated footage of the band, when contrasted with their museum commemoration, serves to distinction the previous and current, and finally creates a chronology, albeit non-chronologically. Alternatively, the biopic mission is tongue-in-cheek, as if it had been extra in regards to the biopic style than about Pavement themselves, and thus, it embodies the group’s ironic musings. However this might not really feel extra completely different from the musical theater mission, which pulls from the group’s lyrics and melodies to create a honest story (this present additionally actually did premiere, in 2022).
Whereas Pavements may seem to be it meanders for the primary of its two hours, slicing quickly between these 4 trajectories helps weave collectively an entire cloth — in regards to the band’s story then and now, and in regards to the battle between their method and the which means behind their work. Whereas watching the film, chances are you’ll not really feel such as you’re studying something in regards to the group or its members, however all that actually means is you are not studying issues in line with the linear, simple language that the majority music docs and biopics have established.
Nevertheless, the movie’s most entertaining segments are undoubtedly these that includes Keery, which chronicle his fictitious preparation course of in meticulous element. Greater than something or anybody in Pavements, the actor appears to embody the group’s spirit via his Borat-like pranks, during which he sits down with accent coaches to organize for his position as Malkmus and meets up with numerous folks he thinks may be capable to assist him keep in character. Fittingly, the one music movie Pavements resembles in any style is Popstar: By no means Cease By no means Stopping.
What does Pavements really need to say in regards to the band Pavement?
The movie, amidst its head-spinning montage method, goes to ludicrous lengths with its movie-in-a-movie, all however presenting it in full throughout its runtime. Nevertheless, this prolonged lark is not actually in regards to the band, per se, the way in which the opposite segments are — none of that are individually ample to make any viewer a Pavement professional. Past just a few dates and occasions, you are unlikely to come back away from Pavements figuring out way more about its members and their school disc jockey days than while you went in, which understandably elicits the query: “What’s the point?”
The purpose, it will appear, lies within the making of the movie itself, as an anti-biopic that runs counter to all the pieces a regular Hollywood biopic is — or fairly, what it represents. If Pavement was an anti-institution band, then Pavements is its anti-institution film made with their participation. In presenting a hilariously schmaltzy imaginative and prescient of what a simple biopic may need seemed like, Perry helps them keep away from a very critical canonization.
In a method, he helps maintain them younger. Bands, after they attain a sure age or threshold, turn out to be nostalgic cowl acts for themselves, and Pavements is set to forestall this from taking place in any respect prices, even when it means crafting a film on the verge of avant-garde which may alienate half its viewers.
Nonetheless, even when the varied narrative threads in Pavements begin to meander, the film stays an entrancing sensory expertise, given simply how a lot display screen time is devoted to efficiency footage, each actual and re-created. On the finish of the day, regardless of the tips and pranks Perry pulls, he is aware of full effectively that the rationale folks present as much as musical biopics within the first place — and the rationale they’re made to start with — is music that connects with folks’s sensibilities. This, he delivers in spades, all whereas sustaining a reverence for Pavement by being, effectively, irreverent.
Pavements doesn’t presently have a theatrical or digital launch date.
UPDATE: Sep. 25, 2024, 4:51 p.m. EDT Pavements was reviewed on Sept. 7, 2024, out of its World Premiere on the Venice Worldwide Movie Competition. This submit has been up to date to toast its New York Movie Competition premiere.
