Pavements
Alex Ross Perry gives us an often absurd celebration of anti-icons Pavement, and in his film's refusal to be a straightforward biopic, it's a perfect match for the band's sardonic sensibility
Stephen Malkmus, the mouthpiece of slacker rock anti-icons Pavement, once sang “you’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life,” a lyric suggesting a lack of agency in your own personal plotline. Judging by Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s audacious splitting apart of the band’s mythos, that’s not something that bothers Malkmus an ounce. Perry’s mock-doc-biopic-musical is absent of the kind of subject oversight and legacy preserving you see in most prestige music films.
Pavement is the kind of band you either don’t know, love to hate or ride for to the death (or as one fan says early on: “Cosmology is missing a godhead, and Pavement could fill it”). Perry has spoken of how the band wanted to have as little to do with the film as possible (continuing a lifetime dedication to “slacktivism”). Instead, as the pluralisation of the title suggests, he has split its history and cultural imprint at the seams as only a true fan knows best: Pavement the influencers, the earnest artists, the revolutionaries, the wordy nerds, the bratty contrarians.
Perry gets that Pavement isn’t a monolith, but different in the eyes of the beholder, and so the form of the film very much matches Pavement’s spirit by being hopelessly sardonic and rarely straight. At its peak moment, Perry is juggles key scenes of a self-serious biographical fiction (with a star turn from Joe Keery, Daniel Day-Lewis-ing his way into the character of Malkmus), the opening night of an off-Broadway musical, archival footage of the band having mud lobbed at them at Lollapalooza 1995, rehearsals for the 2022 reunion tour, and a staged Pavement museum opening.
It’s probably thrilling and daring to the Pavement obsessive; to skeptics, it reads more like “an album with the b-sides left on”, as Wowee Zowee is described. Pavements may not be an insight into the life and times of the people in Pavement, but it does reflect its soul.
Streaming on MUBI from 11 Jul; screening at Filmhouse, Edinburgh on 11 Jul followed by a pre-recorded Q+A with director Alex Ross Perry
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