It’s hard to succinctly explain anything in Alex Ross Perry’s new documentary/spoof biopic Pavements, but here’s my best shot: About halfway through the film, there’s a scene in the movie-within-a-movie Pavement biopic Range Life, which stars Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as Matador Records founder Chris Lombardi, where the band is confronted by their label about their 1995 three-sided record, Wowee Zowee. Typical music biopic drama ensues—a copy of Rolling Stone is torn up, label heads cry foul over the lack of a hit single, and “Malkmus” storms out—all prefaced by a “For Your Consideration” screener disclaimer. “Lombardi” catches up to “Malkmus,” and they’re coming to the pep talk (chorus) now. But as the heart-to-heart is cresting, the fourth wall is broken: “What if it really was a moment like this?” Schwartzman asks Perry, who’s standing behind the camera. “As far as I know, there never has been,” the director responds.
If reading that is difficult to follow, I can’t promise it’s any less convoluted in the context of the movie. Pavements is a thousand layers deep in meta irony, as it follows the concurrent developments of Pavement’s reunion tour (real), 2022 museum exhibition (real, though with some fake artifacts), jukebox musical (if you can believe it, real), and Hollywood biopic (fake), with archival footage from the band’s history interspersed throughout. The film relies on the audience having a pretty intimate knowledge of Pavement; it spends most of its running time channeling the band’s Gen X slacker vibe and poking fun at music biopic tropes rather than relaying actual information about the music. In fact, key details are omitted, like the deaths of original drummer Gary Young and early Malkmus collaborator David Berman, or even why Pavement was eventually canonized as a legendary ’90s act.
But Pavements, which releases wide this Friday, is also completely brilliant and ambitious—and it captures the band’s essence better than any traditional film could. At times, the film’s stunts resemble a Nathan Fielder scheme more than a music documentary, but what Pavements lacks in straightforward information, it makes up for in feeling. Pavement’s sardonic sense of humor is so key to their image that a film interested in an honest portrait of the band has to tap into that. But the film takes its ironic hypotheticals—Wouldn’t it be funny if there were a musical featuring theater-kid renditions of Pavement songs? Wouldn’t it be funny if there were a corny Pavement biopic where a young, hot actor couldn’t shake Malkmus’s vocal fry?—and uses them as a framework to explore the band’s biggest paradox: How did Pavement create something lasting and important all under the guise that they were just fucking around the whole time?
Pavements’ most revealing moment comes near the end of the film, when the Pavement museum is finally revealed to Malkmus. The room is covered in memorabilia—like the mud-splattered clothes from the band’s infamous 1995 Lollapalooza performance, as well as fake Pavement endorsements for Apple and Absolut Vodka—and younger artists like Snail Mail, Bully, Speedy Ortiz, and Soccer Mommy are there performing heartfelt covers of Pavement songs. Malkmus is confronted with everything he built with this band, and how much it means to people. The usually stoic man is nearly beaming. But what comes out of his mouth? “There’s a lot of joy to be, uh, sentimental,” he says. “People relate to that, I think.” The fact that Malkmus was so close to (gasp) showing emotion—and pride at that, yuck!—but still keeps himself just out of arm’s reach is actually more touching than if he had fully expressed his feelings. Sure, this scene requires an understanding of Pavement’s whole deal for it to achieve maximum impact, but it reveals more about its subject than, say, last year’s fact-based Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, or even standard, self-curated musician-doc fare like Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana. Which raises the question: Does a movie about a musician actually have to be informative to teach us something about the artist?
When Pavements was first announced in 2022, Perry compared it to the plethora of Bob Dylan movies, and this was before A Complete Unknown even came out. “You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates and put them all in a blender,” he told The New Yorker. Haynes’s 2007 film I’m Not There is the most natural comparison point for what Perry ended up doing with Pavements. Even though those films have drastically different tones, both experiment with the form of a music-based film in order to suit their subjects. I’m Not There employs six different actors to portray fictionalized versions of Dylan, all representing a distinct phase in his storied career. This framework allows the film to get experimental with its casting, using an actress in Cate Blanchett and a Black teen actor in Marcus Carl Franklin to represent different aspects of Dylan. Like Pavements, I’m Not There asks its audience to have a pretty extensive familiarity with its subject as a prerequisite. Real details about his life that a casual fan might not know—like a young Dylan visiting an ailing Woody Guthrie in the hospital, or the motorcycle accident that nearly killed him in the mid-’60s—are presented abstractly.
Take Dylan’s electric Newport Folk Festival performance in 1965. In I’m Not There, it’s an abrupt moment where Jude Quinn (Blanchett’s Dylan stand-in) is ramping up to perform “Maggie’s Farm” onstage at the never-introduced festival. Jude and his bandmates are seemingly taking their instruments out of their cases with their backs to the camera, only to turn around and fire machine gun rounds at the festival audience. Compare that to the portrayal of the same moment in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which spends its entire running time building toward Dylan going electric. The entire Newport Folk Festival saga is laid out clearly and meticulously, incorporating famous details—like Pete Seeger pondering whether to cut the power with an axe and an audience member calling Dylan “Judas”—in a way that’s easy to follow for viewers who may not know the story but doesn’t offer much for hardcore fans. A Complete Unknown technically relays more information about the event, and a viewer is likely to walk away from that film having learned something. But how did Dylan going electric feel? That’s what I’m Not There was interested in exploring. Maybe the differences in those films can simply be boiled down to the fact that they were aimed at different audiences—I’m Not There was a niche project for Dylan die-hards that barely crossed $4 million at the domestic box office, while A Complete Unknown was a crowd-pleasing greatest hits tour that raked in $75 million and earned its lead a Best Actor Oscar nomination. But what does the latter offer that you can’t get from the (actually pretty in-depth) “Electric Dylan controversy” Wikipedia article? I’m Not There was a more compelling artistic endeavor in seeking to evoke Dylan’s essence in a way you can’t get at just by rattling off the facts.
More on Pavement
That’s not to say that every unique approach to a biographical music film is worthwhile. Pavements’ wide release comes a few weeks after Abel Tesfaye’s feature, Hurry Up Tomorrow, mega-flopped in theaters. On paper, Tesfaye (a.k.a. the Weeknd) uses the film to explore his flaws, not unlike what Bob Fosse did with All That Jazz or what Prince did with Purple Rain. (Don’t worry, that’s where the comparison with those two films ends.) Directed by Trey Edward Shults (Waves, It Comes at Night), Hurry Up Tomorrow is a companion to the Weeknd’s album of the same name from earlier this year, and it is a fictionalized account of the musician during a world tour and a nasty breakup. We see Tesfaye leave foul voicemails for his ex and turn to sex and drugs to cope. But when our downtrodden star meets Jenna Ortega’s Anima, a Weeknd fan who sneaked backstage at one of his concerts, a magical night straight out of Wattpad unfolds. They play air hockey and bond over feelings of loneliness before Anima is immediately moved to tears by a new Weeknd song (“Hurry Up Tomorrow”) Tesfaye plays for her. Despite their connection, by morning, he’s dissing her like we can assume he has every other woman, but this time, things turn violent. Anima knocks him out and ties him to the hotel bed in an effort to make him confront his toxic behavior, eventually killing his manager (played by Barry Keoghan) in the process. Anima is about to set fire to the hotel room and kill Tesfaye, and surely a true moment of reckoning is coming. OK, here it comes! It’s … Tesfaye singing “Hurry Up Tomorrow” to her? And THAT’S what makes her let him go? That’s it?
Maybe by being too up its own ass to do any real self-reflection, Hurry Up Tomorrow does reveal something about the Weeknd, though that’s probably not what Tesfaye and Co. set out to do. The film is too cowardly to show Tesfaye confront himself in any meaningful way (Fosse actually killed his stand-in character at the end of All That Jazz), and the music isn’t good enough to justify all the self-mythologizing (Purple Rain the movie WAS SOUNDTRACKED BY PURPLE RAIN THE ALBUM). But its worst sin is that it lacks imagination—so much so that it actually ends up evoking some of the biopic tropes it’s ostensibly looking to subvert in approaching a music film this way (“Get outta here Dewey. … You don’t want no part of this shit!” came to mind as Keoghan’s character was supplying Tesfaye with cocaine).
While Pavements’ ambition could come across as overindulgence in the wrong hands, it’s self-aware and funny enough to balance its many absurd elements, while Hurry Up Tomorrow is marred by a seriousness that drags the whole thing into unintentional self-parody. That deft hand is what makes Pavements so impressive—Perry put in what must have been a tremendous amount of effort to bring the musical, museum, and fake biopic to life and used it all to actually reveal sides of the band that even superfans weren’t privy to. And the film accomplishes all of this while experimenting with one of cinema’s stalest genres! With music biopics like Scott Cooper’s Bruce Springsteen flick and Sam Mendes’s Beatles saga on the horizon (which look like they will be in the traditional mold), something that’s not afraid to get weird, like Pavements—or even something totally different, like last year’s CGI monkey Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man—hits harder.
“We can’t do it. We’re not Sonic Youth. We’re not Hole,” says Logan Miller as Mark Ibold in one of the Range Life scenes in Pavements. The scene takes place after that muddy Lollapalooza set and is supposed to show a dramatic blowup between the band members at their lowest moment. But any climactic biopic reckoning is immediately undermined as the scene is juxtaposed via split screen with real footage from after Pavement walked offstage that day that shows them laughing and joking around. Maybe there was some real anger simmering among the band after that set, and maybe there wasn’t—but putting the real and fake events side by side shows how little we can gather about how a moment felt by simply trying to relive it. So why try? By distorting the facts, you might get closer to something true anyway.
