PAVEMENTS - Mark Reviews Movies

Pavements, Utopia Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 1, 2025

The band Pavement is repeatedly referred to as the preeminent slacker band of the 1990s, so it's somewhat ironic that so much effort has been put into director Alex Ross Perry's Pavements. Where does one even being with this one?

Well, it's presented as a documentary about the band, from its origins, to its breakup in '99, to a brief reunion and another hiatus, and to yet another regrouping that started in 2022. There's some basic biographical information about the assorted members of the band, as well as plenty of archival footage of interviews, concert performances, and the musicians hanging around.

Since the movie is also about their most recent reunion tour, Perry also gives us some behind-the-scenes moments of the band rehearsing, having trouble playing their old tunes, and being passive-aggressively chided by front man Stephen Malkmus, whose personality, attitude, and opinions are tough to ascertain here. The band's music is decidedly experimental, especially in its early days when they'd play with instruments in unique tunings or just plain out of tune.

In that older footage, Malkmus himself basically says that singing in key isn't necessary in a rock song. Either his opinion has changed, or all of those previous sentiments were just part of the persona the singer put on in public interviews, because there's an uncomfortable moment when tells bassist Mark Ibold that his bandmate had better start working on his back-up vocals if the performance is going to sound any good. Considering that this movie ends with the last show of that reunion tour and nobody in the band seems especially eager to talk about any future collaborations, maybe it's best to just accept everything we see from that rehearsal footage and the more awkward moments from those past interviews as the way things really are.

The movie, though, forces us to question a lot about the band and, indeed, the entire purpose, method, and authenticity of its making. To call this a documentary would be accurate to some extent, because we do learn the basic background of the band, its members, its tumultuous history, its efforts to become as successful as they could with this kind of music, and its repeated endings. To call it a documentary, however, would also be misleading, because there are facts here that are, well, just completely made up.

Part of the narrative here involves the opening of a museum dedicated to Pavement's history, and on one wall is a display of many gold records and one platinum one. The band never achieved those kinds of record sales, by the way, and one doesn't even need to look up those stats to learn that information. After all, Malkmus and a couple others point out in those older interviews how the sales of every album they released were disappointing, especially since they played with the likes of Nirvana and Sonic Youth.

A lot of the movie, in other words, is a joke. The museum and its questionable trivia and artifacts are just part of it. Another is a fictional biographical movie that Perry claims to be making alongside the documentary, starring the likes of Joe Keery as Malkmus, Logan Miller as Ibold, Nat Wolff as guitarist Scott Hannberg, and Fred Hechinger as percussionist/synth-player Bob Nastanovich, as well as Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker as record label executives. This is the funniest running gag in the whole project, since the phony movie serves as both a parody of biography clichés and a pointed satire of creative self-involvement. That second part is entirely by way of Keery, who plays himself as an egotistical actor in search of award recognition and unable to turn off his character's dialect.

There's one final element that almost seems impossible to fake to the same degree as the pop-up museum and a clearly unconvincing feature movie. That's a stage show—a jukebox musical, to be precise—featuring an original story that revolves around Pavement's music. That part of the movie clearly had a lot of work put into it, from auditions, to arranging the band's songs into showstopping numbers, to the costumes and choreography, and to the fact that the whole show is performed for at least one live audience at the end of that process. That's its own joke, of course, about the influx of such musicals, but if it is all a gag, one hopes the entirety of the cast and crew was part of it.

The big question remains, though: What is the point of all this deception? Is it an convoluted satire of up to four distinct mediums, or since made-up dramatization and the museum are obviously fakes, should we take the straightforward documentary and/or the musical seriously? It's clear we can't trust Perry, who must have had a lot fun developing this on his own or with the band's participation, but can we actually believe what we see from those rehearsal scenes or, if the band really is capable of assembling even some aspect of the pranky parts of this movie, anything about the band at all?

It's entertaining to be put in this kind of position—to be left questioning so many levels of the reality—by a supposed documentary, and sure, there's an argument that a great prank is one that doesn't reveal itself. Pavements does reveal too much of itself, though, to be a joke at that level.

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