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Your music taste defined you in the ‘90s. Before the internet blurred allegiances, the metal kids only listened to Megadeth and Metallica (but only stuff prior to their 1991 self-titled mainstream success), the sensitive theater folks liked R.E.M. and Peter Gabriel while suburban punks reached for Dookie. Everyone listened to Nirvana. However, only the coolest, most disaffected slackers had Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain spinning constantly on their Walkman.
Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements ostensibly functions as a documentary about Pavement but like the band’s work, there is an unshorn self-modesty that disallows for the conventional talking-head-meets-archival-footage approach that most rock docs tend to follow. Instead, Perry opts to employ five different narratives to present a fractured look at Pavement and its legacy.
First off, if you aren’t a Pavement fan, it’s highly likely Pavements isn’t for you. A certain familiarity with Stephen Malkmus’ songs and the band’s short-lived history is more or less required to enter. For the uninitiated, the segments tracing the band’s indie rise and premature end is a good primer and so is the story about the group reforming in 2022. But after that, things get weird.
Another strand follows a museum exhibition that Perry produced about the band. Another looks at a musical theater production that Perry mounted using Pavement’s music, a la American Idiot. And the most confounding is the making of a fake biopic called Range Life starring Joe Keery (of Stranger Things fame) as Malkmus.
Clocking in at over two hours, Pavements is a bit of a tangled mess but so is much of the music of the band it’s feteing. Still, Perry doesn’t allow the movie to slip into hagiography. It is self-aware, even down to a reference to Bohemian Rhapsody in the phony biopic sections. This is important because the idea of “selling out” was the kiss of death to those cool kids in the ‘90s who loved Malkmus and Pavement.
This idea of “selling out” comes up a few times, including fake ’90s ads for Apple and Absolut Vodka that feature Malkmus and a riff on Wowee Zowee cover art, respectively, displayed at the exhibition. Malkmus acknowledges that this notion of “selling out” doesn’t exist today, something Perry and Pavement are clearly conscious of avoiding when making the obligatory documentary.
Despite its length, Pavements doesn’t dig in deep enough at times, especially in the final years. Brighten the Corners and Terror Twilight are barely mentioned, though the band’s infamous skirmish with a Lollapalooza audience in West Virginia in 1995 is given ample screen time.
Like other mercurial musical acts, Pavement thrives on a slippery subversion of truth. Though Pavements attempts a similar conjuring act as Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan by Martin Scorsese, it feels less willful and bought-into its own concept. If anything, Pavements will appeal to longtime fans who will agree that their beloved Stephen Malkmus and company survive the rock doc/rock biopic treatment and still emerge with their dignity intact, selling out be damned.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
