The band Pavement has always straddled the line between sincerity and irony, whether in interviews, music videos, or their own songs. So it’s only fitting that director Alex Ross Perry’s new film, Pavements, which will play at the Hi-Pointe Theatre from June 2-5, offers a prismatic portrait of the band that walks that line in an enjoyable and amusing way.
For those unfamiliar, Pavement is an indie-rock band that was primarily active between 1989-1999, but has periodically come back together for reunion tours. Ahead of Pavement’s most recent reunion tour in 2022, their label, Matador Records, reached out to Perry to see if he’d be interested in making a film about the band. Knowing that he wanted to take an unconventional hybrid fiction-nonfiction approach, Perry brought on frequent collaborator and experimental nonfiction filmmaker Robert Greene as both editor and a producer. From there, the two began conspiring to find their way in for this film.
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“Alex’s best quality is his willingness and excitement around pranking people,” Greene says. “His best writing is that, and his best ideas are when he commits and says, ‘Let’s do the full nine on this.’ It was exciting to be a part of.”
As poster children for the Gen X aversion to “selling out,” Pavement was known for putting their music and experimentation ahead of any commercial prospects. Frontman Stephen Malkmus, with his aloof and smarmy slacker persona, only fanned the flames around this ethos. With that in mind, Perry wanted to frame this film around what the hyper-commercialized version of a Pavement reunion might look like instead.
“In the movie, Malkmus says, ‘I don’t like to talk about music in career terms,’” Greene says. “We thought it would be really funny to imagine the world where the band that was known for ‘ruining their own career’ got turned into a commodified thing. To me, Pavement resisted that kind of commercialization, so they’re the perfect vehicle to comment on it.”
The result is Pavements, a film that combines elements of a rock documentary with elaborate fictionalized elements constructed for the film. These include Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, a sung-through jukebox musical of Pavement songs in the vein of Green Day’s American Idiot; Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum, an exhibition filled with “artifacts” from the band’s history; and Range Life: A Pavement Story, a star-studded biopic parody meant to poke fun at prestige-y music biopics such as A Complete Unknown, complete with constructed behind-the-scenes footage of Stranger Things star Joe Keery going too deep to play Malkmus.
“The archetype of this is VH1’s Behind the Music, which made every dramatic rock story, so hyper-soap operatic,” Greene says. “The joke is that Pavement never had anything close to that. They got mud thrown at them one time. They broke up. There was no real drama, and that just makes it funnier.”
Perry and Greene use all of these elaborate bits in parallel with documentary footage of Pavement preparing for their tour and a trove of archival and performance footage, ultimately creating something that captures the essence of the band, while walking the line between sincerity and irony.
“Whenever I am making any hybrid fiction-nonfiction film, it’s always asking, How does this form illuminate what we’re trying to get at?” Greene says. “It’s not about the form itself. It’s how the form gets you closer to the heart of the matter, and I think this was a way to get closer to the heart of Pavement. The best compliment we get when people watch this movie is that they feel like they’re experiencing Pavement.”
For the St. Louis premiere of Pavements, the folks at Hi-Pointe have arranged some special festivities to accompany the film. First, they will have a lobby exhibit showcasing Pavement memorabilia from the Shady Lane Appreciation Society, Missouri’s Pavement fan club, including some pieces from Matt Harnish of Bunnygrunt, who spent time on the road touring with Pavement in the 1990s. For the June 5 screening, Hi-Pointe will also be hosting a pre-show performance by Space Quaker and a post-show Q&A with Greene.
Pavements is playing in St. Louis at the Hi-Pointe Theatre from June 2-5.
