Everybody thinks they know their favorite musicians or bands inside and out: what the lyrics mean, when their style changed, which fabled event made or broke their careers. Filmmakers have always been willing participants in the process, from concert movies to intimate documentaries to glossy biopics. We crave the results, because the myth-weaving is collaborative. And sometimes it involves bending reality a bit to get a better story.
Nominally, the subject of the eccentric new documentary “Pavements” (in theaters) is, well, Pavement — but in truth, it’s about the whole ecosystem that creates the legend. The 1990s indie-rock band reached moderate fame in its prime, broke up in 1999, and reunited for tours in 2010 and 2022, which is where “Pavements” begins. The band has a lot of lasting fans, mostly people old enough to have gone to shows or listened on their local college station during Pavement’s original run. There are also a lot of people who’ve never heard of it.
That makes the band an unlikely subject for a documentary, which is kind of the joke — and which lends “Pavements” its bigger theme, too. Directed by Alex Ross Perry and edited by the documentarian Robert Greene, it’s a hard film to describe. Part spoof and part serious, its vibe is very much in keeping with its subjects. There’s the documentary part, about the band’s formation and various albums, with archival footage and interviews, a format familiar to anyone who watches documentaries these days.
But there are at least three other things going on inside this movie, shot by the cinematographer Robert Kolodny in a variety of visual styles designed to recall genres we’ve seen before. We watch the creation and rehearsal process for “Slanted! Enchanted!,” a Pavement jukebox musical that culminated in two workshop performances in New York in 2022 (one of which I attended). We see the opening of a museum-style show with memorabilia.
And woven into this is footage that purports to be a behind-the-scenes look at the making of “Range Life,” a Hollywood-style biopic about the band. The main focus is Joe Keery (from “Stranger Things”), who is cast as the Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus and spends much of his time engaging in increasingly goofy attempts to “get inside” the head of the almost comically laid-back Malkmus. This footage is obviously poking fun at musician biopics like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Elvis” — at one point, Keery complains to a vocal coach that he can’t seem to get rid of Malkmus’s vocal fry, and the “screenwriters” are constantly inventing heightened moments.
“Range Life” does not exist, though there are scenes “from” it in the film, sometimes shown in split-screen with actual archival footage of the moment being depicted. And while “Slanted! Enchanted!” did get a stage production, it hasn’t reached Broadway yet. The museum show did happen — though some of what’s in it is fabricated, including a few fake ads for Apple and Absolut Vodka that the band very much did not shoot — but everyone in attendance seems a little dazed and confused about it, including the band. Mush all these pieces together with archival video of interviews with the musicians (in which, at times, they just make stuff up), and lace it with occasional glimpses of the crew of “Pavements” making the film, and the effect is delightfully destabilizing. At some point we lose track of whether anything in here is real at all, or whether maybe it all is.
That’s sort of the point. The art created around an artist — a musical, an exhibition or most definitely a film — memorializes and mythologizes, and the story takes on a life of its own. The low-key and never very mainstream Pavement seems like the last band that would get this treatment, and that’s the joke. But it also makes the band the perfect subject for what “Pavements” is slyly doing, and quite brilliantly, too.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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