How a kaleidoscopic new doc on indie-rock pioneers Pavement became the year’s most unpredictable music film
At the start of 2020, Alex Ross Perry started bingeing Ingmar Bergman movies, making his way through dozens of the Swedish auteur’s dark, uncompromising dramas. In 2022, inspired by Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, Perry visited Fårö Island, the isolated Swedish spot where Bergman lived and shot several masterpieces. In Bergman’s home, Perry worked on the jukebox-musical portion of Pavements, a comedic, knowingly ridiculous film about the 90s rock band Pavement. Led by chief songwriter Stephen Malkmus, Pavement are a guitar outfit known for being ironic, lackadaisical and elusive. We can add another adjective: Bergmanesque.
In Pavements, a documentary that’s not really a documentary, the actor Joe Keery, in an attempt to understand Malkmus, strokes a projected image of the singer in a parody of Persona. Elsewhere, Malkmus’s lyrics, often considered to be nonsense, are analysed for their self-reflection. Moreover, Malkmus, like Bergman, is a control freak: there are tracks where he played every instrument, including drums. “I became so in touch with Bergman’s endless project to combine theatre, where he worked even more prolifically than film, with narrative constructs of performance framed around autobiography,” Perry tells AnOther Magazine. “He’s not a meta filmmaker, but he’s closer to it than people assume.” Perry points out that two of Pavement’s biggest hits, Cut Your Hair and Range Life, are about sudden fame. “Malkmus was obsessed with the identity of a musician as a narrative construct.”
Perry, the 40-year-old American director of talky films like Listen Up Phillip and Her Smell, has invented a movie genre. It’s just not clear if it has a name yet, or if it’s really several genres mixed together. Whatever Pavements is, it comprises several sections: a guide to the band’s real history through archive clips; another guide to a fake reality where they’re bigger than The Beatles; footage of rehearsals for their 2022 comeback; a staged Broadway musical called Slanted! Enchanted!; and the making of a fake Hollywood biopic, Range Life, starring Keery, Jason Schwartzman and Nat Wolff. Perry cites Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk as a key inspiration: the separate strands of Pavements all climax in the third act to the guitar feedback of “Grounded”, just as the three timelines of Dunkirk culminate ten minutes from the end to Hans Zimmer’s score.
A decade after they formed, Pavement split up in 1999: at the final gig, Malkmus attached handcuffs to his mic stand, claiming it symbolised being in a band. They reformed in 2010 (I saw them three times that year, and they looked miserable), and again in 2022 (I saw them three times, and they looked ecstatic). With Malkmus eschewing standard guitar tuning, Pavement aren’t a normal band, and so Pavements isn’t a normal film either. When a fake trailer teased a full-blown biopic called Range Life: The Pavement Story, Pitchfork, misunderstanding the joke, wrote up an incorrect news story and later issued a correction. However, Perry denies he’s invented a new type of movie. “The north star is always The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, the Sex Pistols film which is scripted, animated, a concert film, music videos and everything in between,” he says. “That’s an act of radical filmmaking.”
Perry, who admits he’s a Pavement fan but not a superfan, recognises that I’m one of the latter. For the interview, I’m wearing multiple items of Pavement clothing. I’ve seen Malkmus live at least ten times. I barely use social media (my Twitter handle is a Pavement song) but I’ve argued with strangers online about Pavement. Years ago, I wore a Pavement T-shirt when interviewing Noah Baumbach, who teased that my mind would be blown by Barbie; the film, written by Greta Gerwig and Baumbach, mocks Pavement fans, and the duo appear in Pavements, meeting Malkmus backstage.
The film, then, is packed with Easter eggs, including sound cues that align with the running order of Wowee Zowee. Perry credits his frequent editor, Robert Greene. “Robert told me, ‘This is my favourite band of all time. You’re doing everything you can to deconstruct, question and tear down the notion of how great the band is. I’m going to build that notion back up in the edit.’ We have over 90 music cues. Sometimes it’s four versions of a song cut together. That’s psychotic fan stuff that only Robert could have done.” When I ask about a blink-and-you-miss-it snapshot of a letter from Malkmus asking for Flux=Rad to be swapped with AT&T on the Wowee Zowee tracklisting, Perry admits he has no idea what I’m talking about. “If Robert were here, he’d give you five minutes on that one-second image.”
Some footage, including interviews with Malkmus, first appeared in Lance Bangs’ 2002 documentary Slow Century. “We were fortunate that Lance became a partner on the movie as a producer and opened up his archive to us,” says Perry. “The band didn’t want our new movie to be a cookie-cutter documentary, because 20 years ago, a very literal documentary was made. If you made it again, you’d be repeating something that fans already have.”
I mention that Bangs, on podcasts, has recalled voicing his displeasure over early cuts, at one point threatening to remove his content from the film. Perry tells me that he took the movie extremely seriously and listened to all the people whose stories he was depicting. “This movie is not about Lance.” I bring up Bangs revealing that Harmony Korine originally turned down the chance to make a Pavement film. Does that mean Matador, the record label, didn’t really know what they wanted?
“This movie wasn’t my idea,” says Perry. “Danny Gabai, who’s a producer on the movie, and Matador came to me. He’s worked with Harmony, so it’s entirely likely that happened, although if Lance said it, I wouldn’t take it as a fact. I would take it as a tall tale until I hear it from five other people who can confirm it. Harmony’s very successful, and is unlikely to spend four years making this movie for no money in the way that I was apparently very willing to do. I’m sure the 2005 Harmony Korine version of this movie could have been interesting. I don’t know about the 2025 Harmony Korine version done with videogame aesthetics. It’s entirely likely. But they knew exactly what they didn’t want. They didn’t want a cookie-cutter documentary.”
Does Perry consider Pavements to be the band’s sixth major release, almost like a phantom sixth album? “[It’s] not the sixth, but the Blu-ray needs to sit credibly as a genuine Pavement object that has earned its spot on a superfan’s shelf next to the greatest hits and our soundtrack,” he says. “Our Blu-ray booklet looks like a scrappy little zine in the way Malkmus would design albums. You’re saying exactly what I said years ago, which was: ‘This won’t be the sixth album, but this will be the thing that sits there.’”
Pavements is streaming on MUBI from July 11.
