This text appeared within the Could 9, 2025 version of The Movie Remark Letter, our free weekly publication that includes authentic movie criticism and writing. Join for the Letter right here.

Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024)

An early title card in Pavements, the brand new biopic-doc hybrid from director Alex Ross Perry, describes the indie-rock group Pavement as “The World’s Most Essential & Influential Band”—the primary cheeky joke in a movie crammed with them. However each joke incorporates a grain of reality, a maxim that undergirds Perry and editor, co-producer, and tacit co-author Robert Greene’s kaleidoscopic movie in regards to the band.

Personally, I noticed the sunshine after I was first uncovered at age 15, after Pavement’s authentic run within the ’90s. (They broke up on the shut of the final millennium earlier than re-forming extra lately.) I had been raised on traditional rock; I’d simply gotten into the Velvet Underground however hadn’t heard of The Fall, and it will take me a number of extra years to familiarize myself with the punk, post-punk, and underground canons that Pavement was steeped in. On reflection, it was the right time for the band’s 1992 debut album, Slanted & Enchanted, to alter my life. Regardless of basically nonetheless being rock music, it seemed like nothing I had ever heard earlier than. I didn’t know music might be unpolished but absolutely realized. I didn’t know artwork might really feel each handmade and larger-than-life. As a lot as their songs function inside a fairly accessible world of distorted guitar riffs and sing-along choruses, the enduring attraction of a band without delay so prickly and so poppy isn’t simple to clarify.

To their credit score, Perry and Greene method their entry within the rock-doc pantheon by neither proselytizing nor pretending the band have been marginal cult figures. The cussed “would’ve-could’ve” narrative of Pavement tragically failing to cross over into Nirvana-like ubiquity belies their legit inventive and business accomplishments. An initially underground recording mission that organically turned a crucial darling and a profitable touring outfit, Pavement produced an immaculate discography (and an MTV hit!) on their very own inventive phrases, counting on like-minded impartial label Matador to market and distribute their albums, all whereas netting an ardent fan base that remained lengthy after various rock’s business wave broke and rolled again. It’s vital to recollect: all of that is really success.

As an alternative of dwelling on the band’s perceived irrelevance, then, Pavements embodies the Gen-X group’s irreverence by enacting and parodying the worshipful contexts usually reserved for Boomer-approved cultural icons. The movie supplies a standard archival historical past of the band’s decade-long run alongside a fly-on-the-wall account of the middle-aged rockers prepping for their 2022 reunion tour. But it surely additionally integrates choose numbers from an off-Broadway jukebox musical impressed by Pavement’s music, scenes from a pretend biopic in regards to the band entitled Vary Life, and the opening of a mock-celebratory museum exhibit within the vein of David Bowie Is. Greene mixes these disparate parts collectively till they coalesce right into a complete meta-portrait of a band so totally au courant with pop historical past—its sonic glories, its rock ’n’ roll excesses—that their musical deconstruction of its motifs turns into a type of renewal.

Pavements’s self-reflexive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink method brazenly dangers exhaustion and irritation, particularly at a two-hour-plus runtime. (Even die-hard Pavement followers would possibly discover the entire thing obnoxious.) Perry’s varied stunts have transparently ironic origins—Pavement’s restricted business success and modest model would by no means encourage such hagiographic, cross-media variations—but his movie crucially foregrounds the labor concerned in such an elaborate “gag,” the cinematic equal of entrance man Stephen Malkmus’s personal smirking, musical critiques of economic rock detritus. (“Songs imply loads when songs are purchased… and so are you,” he as soon as sang about copycat grunge teams of the period.) Perry really staged Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical for two nights at New York Metropolis’s Sheen Heart. He shot a number of scenes for Vary Life, albeit in a purposefully flat, self-aware fashion, with a coterie of younger actors—together with Stranger Issues’s Joe Keery, whose behind-the-scenes Methodology-style preparation to play the famously nonchalant Malkmus is peppered all through Pavements.

Anybody who has ever dedicated to a sophisticated, perplexing bit is aware of how a lot real work it will possibly require. It’d represent a jape to dream up the concept for a Pavement musical, for instance; really casting, choreographing, and producing it for an viewers inevitably includes forethought and inventive vulnerability that transcend any prankish impetus. The proof is within the pudding: listening to actors sing traditional Pavement songs organized for musical theater will doubtless be a jarring expertise for most followers, but it surely turns into oddly edifying to listen to the acquainted transposed right into a framework so removed from its origins.

Balancing out these fictional and staged components, varied archival televised interviews additionally seem all through the movie, that includes journalists interrogating the musicians about their standing as a critics-only band or castigating them for their supposed lack of ambition. (Pavement’s enigmatic musical alchemy—their off-kilter melodies, Malkmus’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics delivered in his patented deadpan warble—permits for most projection on the a part of acolytes and detractors alike.) Perry and Greene exit of their method in Pavements to rebuke that supposedly aloof picture with a sheer accumulation of footage of the band at work, from limitless ’90s press junkets via dutiful rehearsals for their most up-to-date tour. “With our sort of music, it’s not at all times so quick,” Malkmus sincerely declares at one level. “Individuals must get into it over time and develop a relationship with it. We’re doing our personal factor and we hope individuals perceive.”

It’s becoming that Perry and Greene’s earlier directorial efforts have impressed related questions on intention. Relying on the viewer, Perry’s character portraits like Pay attention Up Philip (2014) and Her Scent (2018) are both perceptive explorations of caustic personalities or grating workouts in affected hostility. Greene’s experimental nonfiction continuously explores how heightened artifice could be an avenue towards deeper truths; his movies demand that viewers interact with deliberately alienating formal conceits. In Kate Performs Christine (2016), actress Kate Lyn Sheil tries (and in the end fails) to grasp the interiority of Christine Chubbuck, a newscaster who dedicated suicide stay on air, whereas getting ready to play Chubbuck in a fictional biopic. Greene underscores Sheil’s honest effort to enter a troubled psychological state, but it surely’s contrasted with scenes from the pretend fiction movie that intentionally appears to be like and seems like a hole, substandard Lifetime film. Per Greene, these scenes are “speculated to be a failure.” Likewise, the overwrought Vary Life scenes in Pavements lampoon the formal and narrative conventions of music biopics.

A nuanced notion of a band with many faces emerges from Pavements’s organized tomfoolery. Vary Life’s sarcastic pose encapsulates the superficial notion of Pavement as reluctant celebrities. Their playful experimentation and relaxed ambition arises from the archival materials. Slanted! Enchanted!’s inherent earnestness reveals the sly romance and longing within the group’s lyrics. The modern footage depicts the band as legacy musicians comfy with their standing. By the movie’s finish, they’re taking part in to their largest crowds and receiving renewed consideration from the youthful technology (partially because of the algorithmic fluke of a half-forgotten B-side going viral on TikTok).

After I was a teeanger, Pavement supplied an entrée into productive skepticism—of pomp and circumstance, calculated careerism, and ersatz feelings, in each artwork and life. These crucial qualities nonetheless exist within the group’s music and picture, however the movie’s closing victory lap emphasizes the stress between their unchanging common man–ness and the latter-day recognition that treats them like stars. Lasting success with out (an excessive amount of) compromise resembles neither (because the lyric goes) “a disaster [n]or a boring change,” however somewhat a realization of Malkmus’s wishes ​​for his personal work: “I at all times hoped that it was music for the long run.”

Vikram Murthi is a contributing author to The Nation. His freelance movie writing has appeared in Filmmaker Journal, MUBI Pocket book, Reverse Shot, and varied different publications.