Watch Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman Butt Heads in an Exclusive Clip from ‘Pavements’

“For kids who felt like everything was stupid and everything sucked, they were your band.” It’s hard to top that summation of Pavement’s appeal from comedian and musician Tim Heidecker. Wildly inventive, weirdly catchy, and perversely self-defeating, the seminal indie-rock group of the 1990s enraptured critics, flummoxed the mainstream record industry, and annoyed the grunge crowd, with one group of moshing goons in West Virginia going so far as to pelt them with mud during a Lollapalooza set. The assailants were probably thinking what the cartoon burnouts Beavis and Butt-Head said over one of Pavement’s few MTV-friendly videos: “Try harder!”

For those of us of a certain age who felt that trying hard sucked and was stupid, Pavement will always be one of the greatest bands of all time. Kurt Cobain may have sung, “Oh well, whatever, never mind,” but Pavement front man Stephen Malkmus lived it. Kind of. He swears that the group actually did their best to be successful; they just had a funny way of going about it. Like, say, never including what would become their most popular song on any album. It took Spotify, and then TikTok, to turn the B-side “Harness Your Hopes” into the rare anthem that unites Gen X and Gen Z.

In his new film Pavements, premiering tomorrow at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell, Listen Up Philip) takes a kaleidoscopic approach to capturing the band’s shambolic magic. He’d been approached by Matador Records, Pavement’s longtime label, to make a film on one condition: It couldn’t be “cookie cutter.” As he considered the offer, Perry says, he thought, “You’re only going to get to make one Pavement movie. This isn’t Scorsese getting to make his fourth and fifth Dylan film. So why don’t I just make every Pavement movie that I, as a fan, would ever want to watch—or hate-watch.”

The result is a nonlinear pastiche of archival music-doc (hinging on that infamous Lollapalooza show), fly-on-the-wall footage of 2022 reunion-tour rehearsals, and three fictional or quasi-fictional elements: a pop-up Pavement museum show combining real and fake memorabilia (no, Steve Jobs did not enlist Malkmus to pose for an Apple “Think Different” ad); a jarringly sincere jukebox musical featuring the star of American Idiot, which really was staged in New York City; and a totally phony “Oscar-worthy biopic” starring Joe Keery as Malkmus, Nat Wolff as Pavement cofounder Scott Kannberg, and Jason Schwartzman and Heidecker as Matador bosses Chris Lombardi and Gerard Cosloy. (Oh, and…I’m in it too? Briefly. In a clip from our 2019 conversation at the 92nd Street Y.)

In this exclusive scene, we get a glimpse of the fictional biopic. Against their will, Pavement have agreed to join the Lollapalooza tour. They haven’t been pelted with mud yet, but they are miserable all the same. Then, Lombardi and Cosloy call Malkmus with potentially life-changing news: The band has been invited to play Saturday Night Live! Malkmus says he’d prefer not to.

I had to ask Perry: Did this really happen? “Every music biopic is blending the relationship between history and fiction,” he replies. “If you think the scenes in these movies happened, you’re a fool. This is a composite scene. We don’t need to show the seven things he turned down, so we just combine them all into turning down the biggest thing that never got offered.” The notion of an SNL offer itself came from Lombardi, who told Perry it was the kind of thing Malkmus would have nixed. “The defeat was that you weren’t going to get this thing to start with,” Lombardi said. “And the defeat again was when the band said no.”

Perry approached the casting of his film-within-a-film as if he were making it for real. “The biopic only works if it’s credibly cast,” he says, and Keery was his first and only choice to play Malkmus. “I was like, I don’t know if there’s even a compelling second choice, because if Netflix made this movie for $30 million, they would cast Joe. And when the time was right, I hit him up and I was like, ‘I’m going to explain to you this totally insane thing. It’s very risky. It’s going to require a lot of faith on your part in me to put you in a movie that makes you look ridiculous on purpose, but not ridiculous by accident.’”

Schwartzman, too, was the obvious choice to play Lombardi, Malkmus’s lifelong friend and long-suffering label chief. “Jason and I sort of bonded over this mutual love of Malkmus years ago,” Perry says. “And when it became clear that a silly biopic would be part of it, Jason is the kind of actor who, in reality, would be playing the label guy in a movie like this. He would be the Tom Hanks in Elvis or the Paul Giamatti in Straight Outta Compton or whatever. He is exactly that type of recognizable beloved actor who gets his big supporting-actor push finally after a long and great career.”

So how did the real Malkmus, who in the opening seconds of the film can be seen refusing to perform Pavement songs that he suddenly considers “stupid,” feel about all this intentionally cringey risk-taking? “It really depended,” Perry acknowledges. Malkmus liked the museum show, and gamely played along as if the fake platinum record and Absolut magazine ads were all genuine. “I think he was less charmed by seeing himself fictionally depicted in ridiculous cliché terms. Anyone who’s not an egomaniac or a sociopath would have to be.… All I could say for two years was, ‘Guys, I really think people will see this for what it is. And I am begging for that trust.’ But I realized, Oh, you guys are too cool to watch these terrible movies. You don’t watch Rocket Man or Elvis or any of these things out of even idle curiosity. You just don’t care. So the buffoonery of this writing and acting is kind of lost, because you don’t hate-watch five music biopics a year as some of us do.”

After debuting at Venice, Pavements will screen at the New York Film Festival in October. A theatrical release is expected next year.