Pavements: A funny, chaotic, and heartfelt tribute to creativity

Walking into Pavements, a music documentary/biopic/experimental film about the band Pavement, I felt a little embarrassed about how little I knew about the band or their music. I always thought they were a band for all the pretentious and underachieving boys I remember from my time doing college radio. Maybe that’s still true, but now I get it. 

Pavements, directed by Alex Ross Perry, is a deeply loving, weird, and funny tribute to a much-romanticized band and the even-more-romanticized decade of the 1990s. It also tells a greater story about how passionate music fandom can inspire years after a band has called it quits. The film incorporates elements of a fictionalized bio-pic, archival footage, and, most interestingly, behind the scenes footage of the making of a jukebox musical called Slanted! Enchanted! using Pavement’s music. The fact that this film makes all of this work in such a meaningful way (especially to a Pavement-know-nothing like myself) is a true testament to Perry’s skill as a filmmaker and passion as a fanboy. 

The movie grounds itself by focusing on a moment in time (2022-23) when three different major events are happening to celebrate Pavement’s career. There is the opening of the aforementioned musical, the fake premiere of a Pavement biopic called Range Life starring Joe Keery and Tim Heidecker, and the opening of a career retrospective exhibition at a museum in New York City. Footage of all of this is interspersed with archival footage telling the true story of the band and what has made them so important and well loved to achieve all of these honorary events. Just typing all that out made me feel tired, but when I was watching the film I mostly felt invigorated—not only by the story of Pavement, but also by all of these passion projects being made about them. As a novice, I became deeply invested in the story of Pavement, from their humble beginning as University of Virginia students in the 1980s to becoming generation-defining slacker icons who were so close to being as big as Nirvana. 

Still, it makes sense that Perry chose to spend just as much of the movie focusing on Pavement’s biography as he does on telling the story of the musical, biopic, and exhibit. There is only so much to the band’s story that can sustain a compelling feature length movie. To put it crudely, some 20-something year old guys met in the late 80s, made not that many albums, became slacker cult heroes, got tired of the grind and each other, then decided to break up right before the new millennium. That’s a pretty well-tread story of any successful, beloved band. What makes Pavements really special is focusing on the later work that the band inspired, no matter how silly or far-fetched that work might seem. 

As I mentioned before, some of my favorite parts of the movie were the ones that focused on the off-broadway musical Slanted! Enchanted! which used Pavement’s music to tell the story of a small town musician who moves to The Big Apple to find fame and fortune. Given the fact that Pavement’s music is often considered as “grungy, slacker rock” that all the cool kids listened to in the 90s, it is a hoot to watch it reimagined in what the movie describes as “the most sincere art form possible” - musical theater. To watch all these pretty millennial and gen-z actors dance to and sing disaffected and ironic Pavement lyrics in their squeaky clean, ever optimistic Broadway voices is awesome. The clash of those two things shouldn’t work, but because everyone involved in the project is so passionate, it does. Passionate fandom is a powerful thing that can often result in bizarre and beautiful things, just like it did with Slanted! Enchanted!. I would give anything to see the actual performance live.

The film also focuses on the creation of a fake Pavement biopic, Rangelife (also directed by Alex Ross Perry) which stars Joe Keery (Stranger Things) as the band’s lead singer, Stephen Malkmus. Pavements spends a lot of time on Keery’s descent into method acting as he tries to learn how to speak and move like Malkmus. It’s really funny to watch Keery work with a dialect coach to perfect Malkmus’ vocal fry, and then panic when he can’t get rid of the voice tic before he has to go back to filming Stranger Things. 

Pavements also features several scenes from the fake movie which feature Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker as their long-suffering label managers who are trying to help them make it big. The film plays this all tongue and cheek because the reality of making a biopic about Pavement is pretty silly. To make an oscar-bait, dramatic film about a band that never seemed to take itself that seriously is a pointless endeavor that misses the spirit of the band entirely. As much as it's an ode to a group of beloved musicians, it’s also a great parody of self-serious music biopics that have become very popular in the last couple decades. It’s like Walk Hard for 90’s burnouts. 

It’s hard to really convey the beautiful, crowded chaos of Pavements in a single movie review. There’s a lot going on in it. Still, it never feels like too much. Everything works and that’s what makes this movie so special. By telling the fairly straightforward story of Pavement’s rise and fall, along with the story of the Slanted! Enchanted! musical, the Rangelife biopic, and the museum exhibit opening, the movie makes a greater statement about passionate fandom and how great art can continue to inspire creativity in new and unexpected ways. 
Pavement may be considered a band from a bygone era, but they also are deeply loved by so many people. Pavements exists because so many people continue to care about Pavement’s music so much. It inspires them to write musicals, make movies and curate massive museum exhibits. Maybe it’s obvious to say that great art can inspire, but when you see it all actually come to life in a movie like Pavements, it’s really touching to see what people can create when they really care about something. I still am not a huge Pavement fan, but I am a huge Pavements fan.

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