If the Hollywood superhero-industrial complex is perishing, the Rolling Stone and Spin magazine extended universe is hastily being built. What better defines “pre-awareness” for the studios like the data logged by Spotify’s algorithm, where billions of track plays confirm what past popular music has stood the test of time, and also how––in the streaming era––you can gouge ancillary money from it?
But unlike the still-brilliant Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which stood to excoriate the nostalgia sought by such films, recently reinvigorated by the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, on the eponymous ’90s slacker idols, justifies that every great band deserves a film portrait helping us to wistfully remember them, and also chuckle as pretty young actors attempt to nail the mannerisms of weathered, road-bitten musicians. So good luck, Timothée.
This leads us to Pavements’ most exciting conceit, part of a sweep of non-conformist creativity redolent of the band themselves. Stranger Things’ suspiciously Tom Cruise-esque Joe Keery is given one task: to become the band’s front man Stephen Malkmus. How does he eat? Does he wear his battered-looking guitar high or slung down? What are the best method-acting techniques to nail his Northern California vocal fry? Keery––and Perry’s writing––treats the young actor’s journey to portraying the band’s front man as if he were rehearsing Hamlet.
Perry’s film, one of his most accomplished and complete-feeling to date, exists in both a past and conditional tense. It gives a brilliant précis of one of indie music’s most influential artists: in its most conventional passages, it’s a visual and critical biography identifying the key features of their suburban and middle-American backgrounds, their initiation into “alt” culture and the art life as students, and their sometimes loving, often tentative rapport with the 90s’ big-money music industry. But after establishing this baseline of reality, Perry and his mock-doc-making, fake-it-so-real editor Robert Greene (who seems a larger artistic collaborator here) devise highly inventive fictional segments that aren’t necessarily plausible but have a persuasive, satirical feel a few semitones off-pitch from reality.
With both the project itself and one of these sequences revealed in a December 2022 New Yorker piece by Holden Seidlitz (who’s also given a short cameo), let’s finally outline what they are. Forgetting their treasure-laden back catalogue and deceptively poetic song craft, their main period of activity lasted the 90s’ entirety; for their afterlife, they must inevitably become a heritage act. Another band documentary might include a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction as a “real” contemporary-set sequence, but Perry opens a postmodern can of worms. Range Life, an Oscar-bait biopic directed by one “ARP,” is going into production; cue marketing meetings at Matador Records (with Tim Heidecker as Gerard Cosloy) directed like they’re summits of an emergency war cabinet. Slanted! Enchanted! is entering its rehearsal period Off-Broadway because American Idiot (and, to be timely, the Sufjan Illinoise musical) is clearly initiating a trend. Directed by someone called Alex Ross Perry who claims he’s a show tunes aficionado, this is the opportunity you never knew you needed to hear “Summer Babe” sung in lush, multi-part harmony with enthusiastic theater-kid “jazz hands.” But then the show’s musical directors sincerely attest to the songs’ complexity and reliance on open tunings, flattering the “muso” contingent of Pavement fans who wish to distinguish them from other, less-niche indie groups.
The David Bowie Is exhibition at London’s V&A played an important role consecrating the glam rocker’s iconic status as he moved towards the final years of his life. But perhaps it created a piece of received wisdom that streams and audiophile vinyl represses aren’t sufficient anymore, so ticket sales have commenced for the Pavement “museum exhibit” where scrunched-up tour set-lists and ticket stubs, handwritten lyric sheets yanked from notebooks, and odd, “faked” ephemera (e.g. Wowee-Zowee x Absolut Vodka cross-promotions) can be gawked at behind spotless glass. We are truly in “the cane from Citizen Kane” territory, as per The Simpsons’ sight gag. Yet in one of the many canny ways, Perry incorporates the music, the band’s spiritual inheritors (who are typically young and female, in point of fact) like Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy performing some gorgeously-sung covers at the guest-listed private view, helping the tone shift into genuine celebration and away from that ’90s default of irony.
Pavements does what it says on the tin, but the tin is full of caviar. For all the self-consciousness about its genre, this film also satisfies as a simply straightforward rock doc, a hagiography for fans to bask in, and––relatedly––a piece of uncritical “fan service.” Watching the film, I wondered what my audience, who were generally composed of non-fans, made of their shambling, imperfect music, their “eternally pubescent croaks and whinnies,” to quote Robert Christgau: they are not Stevie Wonder or Bruce Springsteen, whose chops and wider cultural relevance are more evident. It sometimes resembled the embarrassing pastime of introducing a friend to a song you love but they clearly hate. Yet they didn’t hate it: there was an aura in the room that the film’s abundant non-musical ideas were welcoming them into fold. As the opening lines from “Grave Architecture” go, aptly played near the start: “Come on in.”
Pavements premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements Both Reinvents and Justifies the Rock Doc first appeared on The Film Stage.
