I admit, I'm a total novice when it comes to music compared to movies. In the realm of motion pictures, I've watched and reviewed titles like Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma. Meanwhile, when it comes to music, I only just learned a few years ago “Lost in the Supermarket” was originally a The Clash tune and not just something Ben Folds made up for the Over the Hedge soundtrack. My ignorance may cause some music devotees to reach for the fainting salts (as well it should). However, at least it makes the process of watching new music documentaries interesting. With Alex Rossy Perry's Pavements, an ode to the group Pavement, my ears were treated to all kinds of fresh, kooky tunes while my eyes experienced a unique way of chronicling a band's history.
"They were like a slacker Rolling Stones for the 90s" explains Tim Heidecker about Pavement's appeal. Various song titles from albums like Wowee Zowee and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain lend further insight into this group's dysfunctional creative sensibilities. "5-4=Unity," "Heaven Is a Truck," "Father to a Sister of Thought", they're all eye-catching monikers immediately inspiring responses of "what?" Forming in 1989, Pavement's members, like lead vocalist Stephen Malkmus, guitarist Scott Kannberg, and bassist Mark Ibold, had no desire for mainstream acceptability. Their tunes were esoteric and abrasive, not material destined to exist within AT&T commercials.
Perry’s Pavements gaze begins in the early 2020s where several odes to the band are transpiring at once. A museum full of relics from their heyday is opening in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, in New York, a jukebox musical stage show entitled Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical is in the middle of rehearsals. Then there’s a star-studded music biopic (a transparent parody of the genre played as a straight-faced endeavor on-screen) with Joe Keery as Malkmus getting ready to start production. As these three events unfold, viewers also absorb anecdotes about Pavement’s earliest days as a group.
Much like Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder, Keery’s satirical version of himself in Pavements is a stinging critique of method actors. While Downey Jr. ribbed 2000s performers like Russell Crowe and Sean Penn, Keery’s work evokes a pop culture landscape containing Jared Leto, Austin Butler’s Elvis Presley, and Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan. This Stranger Things veteran is so determined to provide an exact mimicry of this musician that he even secures a photo of Malkmus’s tongue. How else can he expect to get the vocals just right? Pavement means something to people and Keery won’t handle the band’s legacy willy-nilly.
Here in Keery’s over-the-top dedication to portraying Malkmus lies Pavements biggest joke and its thesis. This whole film concerns people lending great meaning to everything Pavement-related. Fliers, doors, mud-stained shirts, anything associated with the band is now a monumental object worthy of museum preservation. The fake in-universe biopic is about infusing grand meaning to every interaction between Pavement’s members and slacker rebellion to the chaotic whims of Malkmus. Yet every piece of archival footage of the band from the late 80s and 90s shows this whole thing was developed in a fly-by-night fashion. They were just gangly weirdos kicked out of other bands who had fun with each other and made some music that resonated with the larger world.
This dissonance between this band’s mythos and their actual nonchalant spirit is most amusingly rendered in a late Pavements sequence simultaneously depicting two versions of Pavement reacting to an early 90s Lollapalooza performance gone wrong. One version is a “scene” from the Keery music biopic. Here, the Pavement members have an explosive response (save for Malkmus remaining aloof) to getting mud thrown at them that almost breaks up the band. Perry astutely understands all the beats and rhythms of Bohemian Rhapsody and its pastiches, so he knows just when to break out moments like the detached Malkmus finally becoming vulnerable.
Side-by-side with this newly created footage is archival video of Pavement’s actual band members getting out of their muddy clothes, romping around a dressing room, and amusing themselves with a nearby mirror. A pristine ode to Pavement imagines the band enduring a tidy epiphany after sustaining endless boo's and hurled rocks. In reality, they just kept on goofing around and enjoying each other’s company. The grandiose hagiography of so many music biopics is punctured in these dissonant images. Artists who “defined a generation” can actually be rambunctious goofballs.
Pavements isn’t here to mock those who find profound meaning in this group’s ditties. Nor is it stripping Pavement’s members of any artistic talent. Instead, it asks viewers to consider how things we assign tremendous importance can have humble origins. A door we now see as being a crucial part of Kannberg’s legacy might’ve just been an object this guitarist pass by every day decades earlier. Rather than viewing musicians on pedestals or imagining their lives transpiring in orderly music biopics, Perry and company want audiences to see artists as people. Off-hand footage of Malkmus and company preparing for a reunion tour, for instance, sees this lead vocalist talking in constantly vulnerable terms.
Heck, while inspecting the Pavement museum on its opening night, Malkmus laments how this event cements the band as “old man stuff” since, after all, isn’t that what normally adorns museum walls? He and the other Pavement members sound like normal, anxious guys, not John Mulaney’s portrayal of a famous rocker who can just make Diet Coke cans materialize. This fascinating rendering of Pavement’s humanity (often amusingly contrasted with a glossy stinging parody of music biopics) deftly co-exists with moving portrayals of how their unorthodox music has inspired people in the modern world. Their outlandish lyrics may have radiated an “I don’t care" attitude, but now they’ve inspired productions riddled with artistic conviction like Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical.
Pavements is not here to offer in-depth explanations why the titular band is so great or influential. Fleeting interview segments have people complimenting the avant-garde instrumental accompaniments of their songs or the band’s subversive lyrical impulses. Mostly, though, this is a cinematic look at the humanity of these folks who made a delightful shriek-laden mockery of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno musical performances. Perry’s imaginative and passionate examination of the group (as well as the endlessly varied manifestations of their artistic legacy) isn't quite enough to make this as good as, say, Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Certainly, elements of it are more interesting to analyze than to watch. However, as a music ignoramus, Pavements did have me often going “wowee zowee.”