Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pavements’ on Mubi, a Brilliantly Unconventional Slab of Docufiction About One of the Stalwarts of ‘90s Gen X Indie Rock

By John Serba

Tonally and thematically, Pavements (now streaming on Mubi) is the cinematic distillation of the scene in the Homerpalooza episode of The Simpsons in which one apathetic Gen Xer asks another apathetic Gen Xer, “Are you being sarcastic?” and the reply is, “I don’t even know anymore.” And so director Alex Ross Perry both pays sincere tribute to influential ’90s indie-rockers Pavement, and dismissively shrugs off the band’s influence because that’s almost certainly how everyone involved would prefer it to be. Contrary to the usual Behind the Musicisms of music documentaries, Perry intrinsically understands what the band’s about and crafts his style to fit, and Pavements is therefore a multilayered quasi-doc that shuffles a deck of truth and fiction and makes us play 52 Pick Up with it.

PAVEMENTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with an on-screen disclaimer that reads, “The stories you hear, you know they never add up.” That’s a Pavement lyric, and a warning about the impending unconventional narrative that will test your reserve and challenge you to determine what’s real and what’s made the f— up – until you just give the f— up. Here’s a hint: Just give the f— up now and appreciate the film for the elaborate Whatever it is, for Perry’s dogged determination to quest after Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth.” This isn’t a tell-all; it’s a tribute.

And so, another on-screen subtitle: “1999 – The World’s Most Important and Influential Band Pavement breaks up and it’s not a big deal.” That’s a lie and a fact. Same goes for the next one, which reads, “2022 – The World’s Most Important and Influential Band Pavement reunites and it’s a huge deal.” Perry then proceeds to collage together a hodgepodgy smorgasbord of 23 years of Pavement. They were formed in the late ’80s in Stockton, California by lead singer/guitarist Stephen Malkmus and guitarist/occasional vocalist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg. They released five albums during the 1990s, on the big-but-still-indie label Matador Records. They didn’t sell mountains of CDs and cassettes and LPs – piles, sure, but not mountains – but they at least played Lollapalooza and The Tonight Show. Their legacy? They’re a groundbreaking 1990s indie-rock band, a critical darling, your favorite band’s favorite band. Their 2022 reunion, a tour but not a new record (note, it was preceded by a similar outing in 2010), was a pretty big deal. But was it triumphant? My friends, Pavement doesn’t exist on the same planet as “triumphant.”

Perry tells this story in a rather head-spinning matter: Sure, there’s some of the usual talking heads, archival footage, and over-the-shoulder glimpses of the band rehearsing for its 2022 tour. But some of the talking heads are lying real hard, and a bunch of junk is fabricated. Perry cuts in the yoozhe here’s-the-band-now (nice and clean and clear in 4k or whatever) stuff and there’s-the-band-then (fuzzy, juddery, VHS-y) stuff – you know, the basics. Perry also stages a musical titled Slanted! Enchanted! – a reference to debut album Slanted and Enchanted – incorporating a bunch of Pavement songs and starring stage vets Michael Esper (American Idiot), Kathryn Gallagher (Jagged Little Pill) and Zoe Lister-Jones. Yes, a musical. A peppy, upbeat jukebox musical interpreting dozens of songs by a pretty much anti-pop band fronted by a droning, off-key unsinger and whose disheveled sonics are its primary component. It played three times several blocks off Broadway and seems to exist wholly for the purpose of this film, to be perplexing for its own sake.

Perry also stages a pop-up Pavement museum full of artifacts including tour shirts (real), gold and platinum records (fake), posters and flyers (real), video installations (real and fake), their first drummer’s “toe nail” (good god I don’t want to know) and other shit, displayed for a gala featuring real bands like Snail Mail and Speedy Ortiz (real) playing Pavement songs (real), and the members of Pavement themselves (real) being interviewed by news media (probably fake) and occasionally hugged by similarly indie-famous peers like Thurston Moore (real). And then there’s the real doozy of Pavements, unquestionably fake: the making of a Hollywood music biopic titled Range Life, starring Joe Keery of Stranger Things as Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as Pavement’s label boss. There’s a whole thing about Keery going Method to play the frontman, to the point where he wants a photo of Malkmus’ tongue and soft palate, thus making it easier to emulate the musician’s laconic suburban-California drawl. Is this how Bohemian Rhapsody and A Complete Unknown were made? Probably!

Photo: Mubi

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: That scene in Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World in which the researchers lay on the ice listening to seal calls – fake. He staged it. The declaration that Pavement is The World’s Most Important and Influential Band is incredibly Metalocalypse in its hyperbole. And Pavements is likely to line up alongside Dig! and I Am Trying to Break Your Heart among the great indie-rock docs.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s hard not to admire Keery’s poker-faced commitment to the bit.

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s like they’re not even trying!” – Beavis

Sex and Skin: None.

Photo: Everett Collection

Our Take: For a movie about thee seminal slacker band, Pavements positively reeks of ambition and effort. Not that anyone truly believes Malkmus and Spiral Stairs and co. are truly slackers. Have you ever tried writing a song? Any kind of song? It’s hard. It takes serious artistic commitment to piece together chords and rhythms and lyrics and melodies, even the melodies of ’90s bands that didn’t like melodies very much, because you have to write around the melodies lest you be accidentally melodic. Pavement honed its aesthetic, and if it looks and sounds half-assed, it’s likely not even half-half-assed. We watch the band work diligently in 2022 to get the songs right for their paying audience, and Malkmus even tosses off a comment about how it’s not easy to “recreate the past” for these concerts.

Not that we get any further insight into their creative process here, or a linear timeline of the band’s career, or a single moment in which an interviewee parks in front of the camera and answers the director’s questions. That’s what other documentaries do, documentaries that never even consider taking a creative approach to biography that captures the creative tones and perspectives of its subject. And it’s as if Perry said, hey, while we’re at it, let’s absolutely savage biopics and jukebox musicals for being superficial formulaic horseshit – the cinematic equivalent of Pavement and their peers’ snotty, reactionary pushback against the artificial “art”-products of the pop music industry. Look beyond the layers of flannel and the unkempt bangs partially obscuring ennui-drenched sneers was a rich vein of authenticity that appealed to a healthy minority slice of a disaffected generation.

So the film doesn’t ask some basic questions: How do the members of Pavement feel about, well, anything? What are their lives outside the band like? What in the living f— is a Jick? And frankly, the answer is, none of your business, man. Mystique is practically nonexistent now, a relic of the 20th century. Pavements adheres to Malkmus’ quasi-mantra, “It doesn’t matter,” as it works through its myriad staged and unstaged scenarios. And Perry executes this mess with intention and vision, not too far removed from his comparatively conventional but still offbeat 2019 drama Her Smell, a fictional saga starring Elisabeth Moss as a Courtney Love-alike on a drugged-out ride on the music-industry rollercoaster. It’s a great, and terribly underrated, film, fully exhibiting Perry’s significant bona-fides.

The logical extension from that film is Pavements, which is doggedly antichronological, because otherwise it wouldn’t be confusing, and confusion is the point. It jumps from a Los Angeles 2022 concert to old interview clips to rehearsals for Slanted! Enchanted! To a Range Life table read to the museum gala, and mixes together real footage of Pavement being pelted by mud during a 1995 West Virginia Lollapalooza date, to actors being pelted by mud in front of a green screen, to a glass-case museum exhibit of the band’s still-dirty mud-pelted clothes from the 1995 West Virginia Lollapalooza date, the film frequently a near-random cycle of new/old/real/fake/“real”/“fake” footage that all blurs together and is nearly impossible to follow, just like the band’s fashion sense. If the intention is to get us to throw away all the ephemera and just focus on the only thing that does matter – the music of course, ya dummy – well, it works. 

Our Call: Do The Jesus Lizard next! STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.