Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024)

Sometime around 2020, the great 1990s indie band Pavement wanted to make a film about themselves. But ever the rakish ironists, they wanted one that would, according to the Q&A after the New York Film Festival screening last night, "avoid the legacy trap." So they purposely did not seek out a documentary filmmaker and instead enlisted Alex Ross Perry, a specialist in spiky indie dramas although he'd already proven himself as a worthy chronicler of 1990s indie rock with the fictional 2018 Her Smell. To give the band what they wanted, i.e., to critique the very nature of the rockumentary, Perry devised three events/art pranks that he filmed over the course of several years - a Tribeca pop-up museum in September 2022 called "Pavements 1933-2022” (“New York—London—Tokyo—Stockton”), a musical called Slanted! Enchanted! at the Sheen Center in NoHo in December 2022, and a cheesy, feature-length Pavement biopic called Range Life, starring Tim Heidecker as Gerard Cosloy and Jason Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi of Matador Records and Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus, which was screened at Brooklyn's Nitehawk Cinema in 2023. Footage from these events, including lengthy interviews with the actors tasked to portray the band in the musical and the biopic, combine with archival footage and material shot by Perry during the band's 2022 tour to create Pavements. 

These events are the ones that avoid the legacy trap. The museum was bedizened with faux artifacts, the musical injected earnestness into an oeuvre high on slacker snark, and the biopic told lies. Pavements, then, turns out to be a rather straightforward chronicle of what transpired over the last few years in this project. This is not a film which stacks fiction onto documentary to inform and confuse one another, e.g., Roberto Minervini's bountiful Louisiana AKA The Other Side (2015). The art pranks, no matter how wacky and legacy-demolishing, are set apart from the archival and recent footage which wind up telling a conventional rockumentary story anyway as it traces the band's history through its formation, discography, breakup, and various reunions. You keep waiting for Pavements to confuse you but it feels like two hours of throat clearing before a Godardian genre-scramble that never comes. 

During the Q&A, Perry tried to sell the film as precisely such a scramble by noting that the museum was a de facto film set. And instead of interviewing contemporary bands about how Pavement influenced them, he had Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Speedy Ortiz and Bully perform Pavement songs at the event because "you need B roll." But how B roll of bands performing, as well as typical documentary fodder such as a shot of Rob Sheffield's Rolling Stone article praising the musical or an article about the belated TikTok success of the b-side "Harness Your Hopes," instead of talking heads extolling Pavement is more legacy/genre-defying remains unclear. 

To be certain, Pavements is still a wild ride. It borrows the frames-within-frames palimpsest style of Todd Haynes' superior The Velvet Underground (2021) and, as such, the editor (and huge Pavement stan) Robert Greene deserves as much credit as anyone. But the glimpses of Range Life and Slanted! Enchanted! are even wilder. So here's hoping both appear as extras on the Blu-ray.

Grade: B