This article appeared in the May 9, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024)
An early title card in Pavements, the new biopic-doc hybrid from director Alex Ross Perry, describes the indie-rock group Pavement as “The World’s Most Important & Influential Band”—the first cheeky joke in a film filled with them. But every joke contains a grain of truth, a maxim that undergirds Perry and editor, co-producer, and tacit co-author Robert Greene’s kaleidoscopic film about the band.
Personally, I saw the light when I was first exposed at age 15, after Pavement’s original run in the ’90s. (They broke up at the close of the last millennium before re-forming more recently.) I had been raised on classic rock; I’d just gotten into the Velvet Underground but hadn’t heard of The Fall, and it would take me a few more years to familiarize myself with the punk, post-punk, and underground canons that Pavement was steeped in. In retrospect, it was the perfect time for the band’s 1992 debut album, Slanted & Enchanted, to change my life. Despite fundamentally still being rock music, it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. I didn’t know music could be unpolished yet fully realized. I didn’t know art could feel both handmade and larger-than-life. As much as their songs operate within a reasonably accessible world of distorted guitar riffs and sing-along choruses, the enduring appeal of a band at once so prickly and so poppy isn’t easy to explain.
To their credit, Perry and Greene approach their entry in the rock-doc pantheon by neither proselytizing nor pretending the band were marginal cult figures. The stubborn “would’ve-could’ve” narrative of Pavement tragically failing to cross over into Nirvana-like ubiquity belies their legitimate artistic and commercial accomplishments. An initially underground recording project that organically became a critical darling and a successful touring outfit, Pavement produced an immaculate discography (and an MTV hit!) on their own artistic terms, relying on like-minded independent label Matador to market and distribute their albums, all while netting an ardent fan base that remained long after alternative rock’s commercial wave broke and rolled back. It’s important to remember: all of that is actually success.
Instead of dwelling on the band’s perceived irrelevance, then, Pavements embodies the Gen-X group’s irreverence by enacting and parodying the worshipful contexts typically reserved for Boomer-approved cultural icons. The film provides a traditional archival history 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 also integrates select numbers from an off-Broadway jukebox musical inspired by Pavement’s music, scenes from a fake biopic about the band entitled Range Life, and the opening of a mock-celebratory museum exhibit in the vein of David Bowie Is. Greene mixes these disparate components together until they coalesce into a comprehensive meta-portrait of a band so thoroughly au courant with pop history—its sonic glories, its rock ’n’ roll excesses—that their musical deconstruction of its motifs becomes a form of renewal.
Pavements’s self-reflexive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach openly risks exhaustion and irritation, especially at a two-hour-plus runtime. (Even die-hard Pavement fans might find the whole thing obnoxious.) Perry’s various stunts have transparently ironic origins—Pavement’s limited commercial success and modest brand would never inspire such hagiographic, cross-media adaptations—yet his film crucially foregrounds the labor involved in such an elaborate “gag,” the cinematic equivalent of front man Stephen Malkmus’s own smirking, musical critiques of commercial rock detritus. (“Songs mean a lot when songs are bought… and so are you,” he once sang about copycat grunge groups of the era.) Perry actually staged Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical for two nights at New York City’s Sheen Center. He shot multiple scenes for Range Life, albeit in a purposefully flat, self-aware style, with a coterie of young actors—including Stranger Things’s Joe Keery, whose behind-the-scenes Method-style preparation to play the famously nonchalant Malkmus is peppered throughout Pavements.
Anyone who has ever committed to a complicated, perplexing bit knows how much genuine work it can require. It might constitute a jape to dream up the idea for a Pavement musical, for example; actually casting, choreographing, and producing it for an audience inevitably involves forethought and creative vulnerability that transcend any prankish impetus. The proof is in the pudding: hearing actors sing classic Pavement songs arranged for musical theater will likely be a jarring experience for most fans, but it becomes oddly edifying to hear the familiar transposed into a framework so far from its origins.
Balancing out these fictional and staged elements, various archival televised interviews also appear throughout the film, featuring journalists interrogating the musicians about their status 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—allows for maximum projection on the part of acolytes and detractors alike.) Perry and Greene go out of their way in Pavements to rebuke that supposedly aloof image with a sheer accumulation of footage of the band at work, from endless ’90s press junkets through dutiful rehearsals for their most recent tour. “With our type of music, it’s not always so immediate,” Malkmus sincerely declares at one point. “People have to get into it over time and develop a relationship with it. We’re doing our own thing and we hope people understand.”
It’s fitting that Perry and Greene’s previous directorial efforts have inspired similar questions about intention. Depending on the viewer, Perry’s character portraits like Listen Up Philip (2014) and Her Smell (2018) are either perceptive explorations of caustic personalities or grating exercises in affected hostility. Greene’s experimental nonfiction frequently explores how heightened artifice can be an avenue toward deeper truths; his films demand that viewers engage with intentionally alienating formal conceits. In Kate Plays Christine (2016), actress Kate Lyn Sheil tries (and ultimately fails) to understand the interiority of Christine Chubbuck, a newscaster who committed suicide live on air, while preparing to play Chubbuck in a fictional biopic. Greene underscores Sheil’s sincere effort to enter a troubled mental state, but it’s contrasted with scenes from the fake fiction film that deliberately looks and feels like a hollow, substandard Lifetime movie. Per Greene, these scenes are “supposed to be a failure.” Likewise, the overwrought Range Life scenes in Pavements lampoon the formal and narrative conventions of music biopics.
A nuanced perception of a band with many faces emerges from Pavements’s organized tomfoolery. Range Life’s sarcastic pose encapsulates the superficial perception of Pavement as reluctant celebrities. Their playful experimentation and relaxed ambition arises from the archival material. Slanted! Enchanted!’s inherent earnestness reveals the sly romance and longing in the group’s lyrics. The contemporary footage depicts the band as legacy musicians comfortable with their status. By the film’s end, they’re playing to their biggest crowds and receiving renewed attention from the younger generation (partially thanks to the algorithmic fluke of a half-forgotten B-side going viral on TikTok).
When I was a teeanger, Pavement offered an entrée into productive skepticism—of pomp and circumstance, calculated careerism, and ersatz emotions, in both art and life. Those critical qualities still exist in the group’s music and image, but the film’s closing victory lap emphasizes the tension between their unchanging regular guy–ness and the latter-day recognition that treats them like stars. Lasting success without (too much) compromise resembles neither (as the lyric goes) “a crisis [n]or a boring change,” but rather a realization of Malkmus’s desires for his own work: “I always was hoping that it was music for the future.”
Vikram Murthi is a contributing writer to The Nation. His freelance film writing has appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, and sundry other publications.
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