Tension and Fame

This tension between artistic and commercial ambitions lies at the heart of Alex Ross Perry’s new documentary Pavements. The film is an exuberant, 128-minute montage of sound and image that is simultaneously an act of fan service — it is unclear if anyone who doesn’t know Pavement will entirely get this documentary — and an attempt at cinematic reinvention. Not only is it light-years ahead of the uncomplicated romanticism of fictionalized music bios like James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, it also decisively breaks from the music documentary format established by Martin Scorsese’s canonical The Last Waltz.

In our age of the corporate algorithm embedded in streaming services like Spotify, Perry appears intent on creating a cinematic work designed to resist the ruling impulses of AI-informed culture. As such, Pavements reconstructs a lost and largely pre-internet world of photocopied fanzines, college radio DJs, and VHS concert footage. Perry’s film gets back to the messy, glorious humanity of making music and the unpredictable joys of music listening at a time when word of mouth counted for more than A&R marketing.

In these ways, Pavements emulates the gestalt of the band itself. From their origins as a noise-rock recording project with limited ambitions to the swansong 1999 album Terror Twilight helmed by Nigel Godrich of Radiohead fame, Pavement made leaps and bounds between LPs, advancing their sound in new directions while also courting a growing fanbase.

This year happens to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Wowee Zowee (1995), a polarizing release that shrugged at the popular success established by Pavement’s first two albums. Unsurprisingly, for this precise reason, it has become a diehard fan favorite, in the shared belief that it reflects the true spirit of a band that rebuffed easy acclaim at every turn. The album’s difficulty from a commercial standpoint — with eighteen tracks, the double LP has three sides and a blank fourth — serves as one comic plot point for Pavements, as well as its provisional Rosetta Stone.

Fight This Generation

The rock critic Rob Sheffield famously called Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Wowee Zowee’s predecessor, a concept album about turning twenty-eight. Though glib in its delivery, Sheffield’s comment coincided with a cultural moment in 1994 — Kurt Cobain killed himself in April of that year at the age of twenty-seven — with Malkmus and his bandmates forging ahead in their own separate way, confronting certain life truths about what to do when the post-collegiate aura starts to fade.

Different in tone from the more experimental, Fall-inspired Slanted and Enchanted, their second LP addressed the prospect of settling down on the Gram Parsons–esque track “Range Life” and speculated about the end of twentysomething hanging out on the nostalgic, sunset-tinged “Gold Soundz.” Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain grasped the impermanence of a life of touring and recording, while also expressing uncertainty about whether the middle-class conformism of American life could provide any meaningful substitute.

Turning twenty-eight for Malkmus also meant dealing with the pressures of budding fame, a challenge he sardonically addressed on the Crooked Rain single “Cut Your Hair,” a song about the cosplay of being a rock star. He also took unveiled swipes at the shamelessly careerist Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots on “Range Life.” Malkmus went so far as to cheekily declare the end of the rock and roll era on the album closer, “Fillmore Jive.”

Wowee Zowee took this theme of ambivalence a step further, with the LP title itself signaling the sarcasm involved. Then again, it could also have been an homage to a Frank Zappa song with a similar title (“Wowie Zowie”) — you never entirely knew with Malkmus.

The album has moments of naked refusal, like the track “Fight This Generation” as well as (more appealingly) lyrical instants of peak nonsense that can double as passing slights toward the recording industry and pending adulthood, whether Malkmus is speaking of castration fears (“We Dance”), private halls of fame (“Black Out”), or boys dying on streets (“Grounded”). “Force-fed integration from the corporation: I don’t need this corporation attitude!” he summarizes on “Serpentine Pad.” Taken as a whole, Pavement pushed back on commercial pressures through evasion and indirection, scrambling any sense of linearity for a track listing, a band, a career, maybe life itself.

Perry steals this willfully obstructionist approach from the band by overstuffing Pavements with at least four — or perhaps four and a half — different plotlines, including the musical theater project Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, a fictionalized Hollywood biopic called Range Life: A Pavement Story, requisite archival footage that traces the band’s history, and more recent material, including a popup museum in Manhattan, during their highly successful 2022–24 reunion tour.

Echoing the patchwork format of styles and genres found on Wowee Zowee, Perry’s documentary is simultaneously a brattish work that conspicuously shows off its talent while also being bound together by affection. There is little attempt at making Pavements commercially viable from a conventional standpoint, imparting a take-it-or-leave-it attitude that the band would appreciate.

Success That Never Comes

At the center of Pavements is the figure of Malkmus, whose Gemini personality can be elusive, self-deprecating, snarky, remote, and heartfelt, depending on the occasion. An unlikely candidate for a rock star, he calls himself “bougie” at one point and discusses how anyone from suburban Stockton, California, would have a chip on their shoulder. There is a resemblance between him and Bucky Wunderlick, the irascible, Dylanesque protagonist from Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel, Great Jones Street.

Malkmus’s charisma has always centered on a mix of smarts, instinctive guitar work, and preppy good looks — Courtney Love once called him the Grace Kelly of alternative rock — and Perry makes his enigmatic charm a focal point, an assignment for which he is exceptionally well positioned. His past films include the black comedy Listen Up Philip (2014) and the even bleaker Her Smell (2019), both of which examine the pathos and self-destructiveness of the individual artist.

Pavements is less critical, to say the least. There is no tragedy to be found in the film — no addictions, romantic breakups, or premature deaths — unless you count Malkmus listening to too many Eagles LPs while growing up. Perry studiously rebuilds the world that Pavement came from: childhood in Stockton where Malkmus and Kannberg met at the age of ten; Malkmus’s attendance at the University of Virginia where he met bandmate Bob Nastanovich and David Berman (of Silver Jews fame); Malkmus’s time as a guard with Berman and Steve West (Pavement’s second drummer) at the Whitney Museum in New York; and his occasional returns to California where he recorded Pavement’s early EPs with Kannberg and Gary Young, the band’s first drummer, at Young’s recording studio, Louder Than You Think.

Other stories disrupt this biographical tour. Nothing could seem more antithetical to Pavement than musical theater, yet the Slanted! Enchanted! project is a revelation, creating an unironic space for a band that once exemplified that 1990s virtue. Range Life similarly provides another reinterpretation, with memorable scenes featuring Joe Keery as Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi, co-owner of Pavement’s label Matador Records. This fictional biopic allows Perry to slip in some visual footnotes, including an amusing passing reference to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, as Keery struggles to understand and become Malkmus.

Circling back to the matter of selling out, if there is a correction that Pavements makes to the established wisdom, it is by showing that Malkmus and his bandmates did try to succeed on their own terms. During one archival interview, Nastanovich pointedly corrects a journalist, insisting that they had done everything they could to be a success. At other moments, Malkmus describes how Slanted was a dream come true (“You’re set, dude”), how Crooked Rain was “a proper fucking album,” and how there were different definitions of success.

While these remarks come and go in passing, there is a latent argument in the film that resembles more recent ones by the literary scholar Jack Halberstam about how failure can be a critical position, opening new spaces of freedom and expression. The band’s members were never transparently political, but they remained reproachful of an industry that perceived artists only in a reductive, monetary way.

Goodnight to the Rock and Roll Era

Pavements eventually departs from such matters since Pavement have, in fact, achieved success. To revise a lyric, they paid their dues, and they have been able to pay the rent. The film treats their 1999 breakup gently. Given its manifold parts, its nonlinear nature, and its self-awareness, it is tempting to call Perry’s film a deconstructionist effort — an attempt at figuring out what makes a person like Malkmus and a band like Pavement work. Yet that wouldn’t be quite right.

With its multiple threads and euphoric maximalism of sound and visuals, Pavements is ultimately about the creative process itself, whether that involves auditioning for a musical, following the acting principles of Stanislavski, facing the animosity of a festival crowd, or simply writing down a set list before a show, which Malkmus does in the opening shot of the film. Pavements is a tribute to artists and the work they do — what it means to make art, even if (and perhaps especially when) there are no guarantees.

By extension, Pavements is also about loving a song, an album, a band, and a period in one’s life so much that you want to revisit it, even relive it, in new and different ways. The film is a paean not only to Pavement, but equally to long-term fans who have sustained and been sustained by Pavement’s music. Through Perry and editor Robert Greene’s madcap montage, a democratic vision of music and the community it can foster comes into focus by the end, leaving any sentiment of irony aside.

There is a moment near the film’s conclusion when Malkmus talks to Schwartzman about the band’s rehearsals for the reunion tour and how committed they are, even though the stakes are much lower. Malkmus has lines in his face and graying hair, as do his bandmates as they practice together throughout the film, reclaiming the material that brought them together decades ago. The commitment involved not only regards performing well, but restoring that intangible, magical quality that made their music and friendship so magnetic.

Pavements is about the desire to return to such moments, to recreate such experiences in the face of impossibility due to the passage of time. This, too, is a kind of refusal. Against a common critical consensus, Perry’s film makes a case for nostalgia as a wellspring for the imagination, as well as a means of resisting the conformities we all face in the course of a lifetime.