‘Pavements’ Is Exactly the Type of WTF Rock Doc the Band Deserves

Stephen Malkmus said, has there ever been a good movie about a rock band?

So Perry started thinking about what kind of film he might make if he were to do a film about Pavement. He could do a documentary about their history, sure. Or he could be a fly on the wall once the band started rehearsing for what would be a triumphant tour in 2022, and simply chronicle that. He could also do a biopic — people love music biopics! Or maybe he would do a jukebox musical around the band’s songs — people love those too! — and then film the process, thus capturing the band’s history via a new theatrical interpretation. And if he was going to celebrate the history of the guys who gave the world “Trigger Cut” and “Debris Slide” and the couplet “walk with your credit card in the air/swinging nunchakus like you just don’t care,” why not devote a museum exhibit to all of the ephemera around the band, from guitar picks to gig flyers to former drummer Gary Young’s toenail (the last one wasn’t a real item… or was it?) and film that too! Why couldn’t Perry make one of these movies? Why couldn’t he make all of them?

Making its North American premiere at the Tim Heidecker as Matador Records co-founder Gerald Cosloy. Oh, and the museum exhibit, which mixes everything from real concert posters to fake mud-splattered outfits worn at a disastrous Lollapalooza stop? That’s in here, too.

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The words arguably most associated with Pavement are “ironic” and “poetic,” which is what made them such an ideal band for the 1990s — the entire decade was all about rolling at your eyes at whatever you were doing while also being extremely good at doing it. (See: Beck, McSweeney’s, the lounge-music revival.) And it’s that the thin beige line separating the above descriptives that Pavements walks, which exactly why it’s the perfectly cracked, and downright perfect, doc on the band. The film is both honest in its love of a band that could be — when Malkmus wasn’t playing onstage autocrat or they weren’t musically colliding into each other — absolutely transcendent live, and yet completely acknowledges that the modern cottage industries around rock-band mythology are, like, so fucking whatever, man.

You can feel Perry rolling his eyes at the two-states endeavor while also being extremely good at blending all of this together, sending up the hyperventilating melodrama of Bohemian Rhapsody, et al., and raising his brows at Broadway’s lucrative subgenre of recycled greatest-hits compilations while also delivering something to make fans salivate. As if inspired by Jason Schwartzman‘s fake Chris Lombardi yell, “The band that ruined Lollapalooza… Is that what you want your legacy to be!?”

But he still gives you a sense of who these guys were, why they mattered, and how Malkmus and Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg’s experiments in lo-fi recording helped revolutionize what we’ll gingerly call “alternative rock.” If that dynamic duo — along with Nastanovich, bassist Mark Ibold, and drummer Steve West — were simply human scare quotes with Fender Strats and an ability to change styles every five minutes, they’d be a nostalgic novelty filed next to King Missile and that “this car is like punk rock” commercial. As anyone who saw them in 2022 can attest, Pavement remains a great band worthy of a great documentary. They now have one, and they can rest easy knowing that it takes their music as seriously as they do, and takes the idea of a “great” rock band as a goof like they do. The cake-and-eat-it-too approach is the only shady lane worth going down with them.

The whole band was present for the NYFF premiere, and joined Perry and editor Robert Greene onstage at Lincoln Center for a postscreening Q&A. True to form, it featured a few snarky digs (asked why Perry was approached, Ibold replied, “The Safdie brothers said no?”), many awkward silences, and Nastanovich stepping in to get the party started. They all seemed to approve of the documentary-slash-avant-garde-performance-art project, though you get the sense they’d be more comfortable with their instruments onstage. Given the way the band aggressively ambled through their show at Sony Hall the night before, working their way through a career-spanning set in a venue as small as the Cavern Club and twice as sweaty, a concert is truly the way they like to interact with the public. Even with the less-than-stellar sound system, their takes on “Box Elder,” “Zurich Is Stained,” “Two States” (Scott Kannberg: good guitarist, great middle-aged-dad dancer), and “Conduit for Sale!” featured the exact kind of carefully synchronized sloppiness that makes those Pavement songs feel like yours, and yours alone.

Some folks noted the Eras-like set list, however, and seized on an offhand remark that Malkmus made after a rousing rendition of “Harness Your Hopes,” a.k.a. the B-side turned unexpected TikTok phenomenon. “That’s the end of our career,” Malkmus said, before exiting stage right. He might have been referring to the chronology of their choices for the evening, given that they kicked off the set with 1989’s “You’re Killing Me” and ended with a 1999 song recently reclaimed for the 21st century. Others thought that this signaled one more farewell among many, and that they were ready to put Pavement to bed permanently. They returned for an encore — “Date With Ikea” and “Fight This Generation” — then left. Maybe it is the end. They got a great victory lap. Goodnight to the rock & roll era, indeed.