Perhaps no movie playing at Venice this year was as shrouded in mystery as Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements. We knew it would have something to do with Pavement, the critically beloved but only moderately successful alt-rock band that released five studio albums before breaking up in 1999. And we knew it would not be a traditional music documentary. In interviews, Perry called the film a “semiotic experiment” that would pay tribute to the band’s sardonic humor. But as anyone who’s attended a liberal-arts college could tell you, it’s one thing to hear the word semiotic; it’s another to figure out what it actually means. Fortunately, on Tuesday I attended a late-night press screening of Pavements alongside every Gen X-er in Venice, which means I am now able to answer the myriad questions a Pavement fan might have about the film.
So is this movie a documentary, a biopic, or what?
The most accurate way to describe it is as a mix of a documentary, a mockumentary, and a fake biopic — all of which share the conceit that Pavement is the most important and influential band that has ever existed.
What do you mean?
Essentially, Pavements is four movies in one. All four parts overlap with each other and sometimes play simultaneously on a split screen. The first is a straightforward documentary about the group, featuring archival footage from their ’90s heyday while also following their reunion for a series of concerts in 2022. Insofar as Pavement was a real band, and everything seen in the old footage did happen, this is the most “real” thread of the film.
(However, even this came with its own accidental level of unreality. The Venice subtitles for the band’s lyrics contained numerous errors — in “Gold Soundz,” they read, “And they’re coming to the forest now” — perhaps giving any Italian viewers unfamiliar with the band the impression Pavement were far more pastoral than they actually were.)
Does the documentary include scenes of lead singer Stephen Malkmus being kind of a jerk to his bandmates?
Indeed it does. However, those scenes almost exclusively come from the archival material. Everyone seems to be getting along better now!
By implication, are the other parts of the film not real?
It might be better to call them “less” real. The second thread tracks rehearsals for Slanted! Enchanted!, a jukebox musical based on Pavement’s music. These rehearsals really happened, and the musical really did have two public workshops in December 2022, with real actors like Zoe Lister-Jones and Broadway’s Michael Esper in the cast. Reviews were positive, in an incredulous I-can’t-believe-this-is-real sense. But the musical is what Baudrillard called a pseudo-event: Perry only wrote it so that he would be able to put it in the movie. We see one Pavement fan audition for the musical, then tell the filmmakers he only showed up to see if it was a joke. His mistake was thinking that the project being a joke precluded it from being produced.
Why a musical?
As Perry explains in the film, he thought it would be funny to put these “slacker songs” in “the most sincere art form” imaginable. Based on the brief snippets of Slanted! Enchanted! seen in the film, the sincerity manages to win out.
Wasn’t there also a Pavement museum around this time?
Yes! The museum exhibit is the third and shortest thread of the film. In the fall of 2022, Perry curated a pop-up museum in New York City showcasing “previously unseen imagery, artwork, and ephemera” from Pavement’s archives for the purposes of this film. This, too, had elements of fiction: The exhibit also included “relics of the band’s real and imagined history,” and the film’s framing device of a newscast from “New York News” is of course an invention. But like the musical, a pseudo-event can still inspire actual emotions. As guitarist Scott Kannberg enthuses while exploring the exhibit, “I thought it was supposed to be fake. But it’s real.”
So that only leaves the biopic. I remember reading that Joe Keery was going to be playing Stephen Malkmus?
I regret to inform you that the biopic is the least real element of the entire movie. For most of the film, Keery is playing “Joe Keery” in a mockumentary purporting to go behind the scenes of a Pavement biopic called Range Life. This Keery is an annoying Method actor who makes a pilgrimage to the former site of the Whitney Museum, where Malkmus once worked as a guard, and obsesses about getting a photo of the inside of Malkmus’s mouth. Other young actors like Nat Wolff and Fred Hechinger show up as themselves playing the other members of Pavement. All of them speak frequently about the career benefits they hope to gain from starring in a music biopic. What scenes we do see from the biopic are purposefully shoddy and studded with “For Your Consideration” chyrons.
So the biopic just straight-up doesn’t exist?
I don’t think so? The film includes footage supposedly from the world premiere of Range Life at a movie theater in Brooklyn. There’s a red carpet, a step-and-repeat, and a talkback. If you go online, you can find records of this event taking place last year. However, reading between the lines, it seems the movie that actually played that night may actually have been a version of Pavements.
Is all of this meta stuff exhausting?
Honestly, it’s pretty funny. Perry’s pranks, puckishness, and masturbatory self-indulgence feel incredibly true to the spirit of Pavement.
Does the movie claim that Pavement was name-dropped in Barbie?
Yes, but unfortunately this too is an invention. The Barbie scene shown at the end of Pavements was a deep fake. (The real reference was Nada Surf.) The Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach seen interacting with Malkmus were actually elaborate animatronics.
