PAVEMENTS (C+/Incomplete) - Call me pedantic, but I don't need much flash or contemplation out of a rock doc, and certainly not a notion wrapped in a concept, swaddled in an idea, nested in a scheme -- which is what Alex Ross Perry has put together, running longer than two hours, as an homage to the '90s indie darlings Pavement.
The oh-so-clever idea here is that Perry is not just assembling a documentary about the members of Pavement; rather, he is obscuring that typical documentary presentation with three other fictional fake-outs. He intersperses real footage with scripted material purporting to show the making of a biographical feature about the band (starring Joe Keery as singer Stephen Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as a Matador Records executive); the staging of a musical "Slanted! Enchanted!" interpreting the band's debut album; and a museum exhibit featuring artifacts from the band, either real or imagined, like Malkmus' lyric notebooks and drummer Gary Young's toenail clipping.
It's all ironic -- get it?! Because, like, the band was never that good or popular or deserving of exalted status or serious reconsideration, but wouldn't it be hilarious if we pretended that they were? Pavement's generation might have slung a lot of slacker shit back in the day, but what is this next level Perry's Millennial generation is playing at? Where's the nuance? Is a wink all you need?
Perry rotates his memes continuously, and in the absence of much actual footage of the band (then and now), you can quickly grow tired of the fake stories. It is not interesting to see Keery (yet another "Stranger Things" alum graduating to the big leagues) pretend that his method-acting obsession has him subsumed into the Malkmus "character," akin to Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan or Austin Butler as Elvis Presley. The whole biopic storyline could have been done better -- and clocked in under five minutes -- as a sketch on "The Ben Stiller Show," which splashed on Fox television around the time that Pavement broke out with "Slanted and Enchanted." And the musical mockumentary has nothing on Christopher Guest's exhausted oeuvre. A much more straightforward and satisfying documentary about the band's origins is the recent "Louder Than You Think," which focuses on the band's original drummer Gary Young but covers most of the group's origin story.
"Pavements" held our attention for only a little over an hour -- when the shtick became tiring and the band's heyday had faded (most notably with an atrocious performance at the fifth Lollapalooza). That was the year of the band's dud of an album, "Wowee Zowee," which I got to pan at the time in the Chicago Sun-Times. That was a year after Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the alt/indie/lo-fi scene was starting to curdle. (This comprehensive analysis of Pavement's top-40 songs per Uproxx notes that one of Guided By Voices' masterpieces, "Alien Lanes," came out a week before "Wowee Zowee," which didn't do it any favors.) To Perry's credit, he includes a clip of Beavis and Butt-head mercilessly mocking a "Wowee" track on MTV, urging the band members "to try harder." It wasn't an invalid criticism at the time.
You can make the argument that Perry ("Listen Up Philip," "Queen of Earth") hasn't made a great feature film in a decade. We walked out of his last music-based experiment, "Her Smell," after an hour, in 2019. He's still an interesting filmmaker, and his willingness to play with ideas and to experiment is admirable. But "Pavements" is a mess. If you didn't like the band members, this might be the movie you would make. Much of the time Perry seems to be mocking them as much as he is skewering music biopics or jukebox musicals. They seem to be good sports about the whole thing.
There are some insightful moments buried under the clutter. Tim Heidecker, who participates as a Matador executive, calls the band "the slacker Rolling Stones for the '90s" (to GBV's Beatles?). Another suggests that they were the band for people who thought "everything sucks and everything is stupid." It is fun to watch the band gather and rehearse for a 2022 reunion tour, straining to remember chords and lyrics, and looking back on their career. But digging out the nuggets here is a chore.
Perry's biggest crime is that nearly all of the archival footage he uses is from "Slow Century," a 2002 documentary shot and curated by Lance Bangs. Perry essentially grave-robs Bangs' film, slices and dices the footage, and then drags it out to 128 minutes by injecting his cute gimmicks. File this under "Life Is Short."
BONUS TRACKS
The band got together last month to promote the film. Here they are with "Harness Your Hopes," an old B-side that gained popularity in recent years due to an algorithm glitch at a streaming service:
Here is the 84-minute documentary "Slow Century," from 2002, available (for now) on YouTube. Check out a raggedy live version of "Cut Your Hair" at the 57-minute mark.
Beavis and Butt-head trashing "Rattled by the Rush":
Our title track, from the band's first release:
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