Pavements

More movies about movies about music.

At a certain point in life, you realize that the coolest people in the room are riven by anxiety and self-doubt the same way you are. They’re just more skilled at masking it.

At least that was one of my takeaways from Pavements — a charming, deeply satisfying, and determinedly bananas new film about the ‘90s indie-rock heroes Pavement. The movie mashes up:

— a conventional band documentary

—a faux, faintly snarky bio-pic

—a faux documentary about making the faux bio-pic

—a real-ish, off-off Broadway jukebox musical called Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical

—a real-ish making-of-the-musical documentary

—a cable news-style item on a short-lived pop-up gallery exhibit (real except for some fake stuff) in New York City devoted to the band on the occasion of a recent (quite real) reunion tour.

Pavements: real / surreal

This is about what you’d expect, philosophically at least, from a Pavement film. Just as they were a rock band that mocked the ridiculousness of rock bands, Pavements is a rock doc that mocks the ridiculousness of rock docs and their ilk — hagiographic bio-pics, song-violating jukebox musicals, bloodlessly fatuous museum exhibitions, etc.

Of course, Pavement is beloved and incontestably great because they embodied celebrated rock’s heart-swelling sorcery; mastered it, pushed it to the hilt. With due respect to Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney, I’d argue (on certain days) that Pavement were the best rock band of the ‘90s.

For all its self-referential formal hijinks, Pavements is satisfying the same reasons — sanctifying a fandom that’s beautiful in spite of (because of?) its own unreasonable ridiculousness. The movie has heart. And the lengths to which Director Alex Ross Perry went not to succumb to the conventional “legacy trap” of cinematic band bios, as Malkmus called it, says plenty.

There’s a moment, about 20 minutes in, when legit Broadway musical star Michael Esper — one of the principals in the production of Slanted! Enchanted! — tries to express how much the band means to him, amidst cutaways of fellow players leaping around a dance studio in Rent-style choreography. “I just love [the band] so much,” he says, pondering the wisdom of a Pavement musical. “I just didn’t even care whether it would work or not.”

Is he being sincere? Is it a put-on? Does it matter? And does the dual-consciousness of it all — in these days of slippery facts — actually make the emotional hit more profound?

In a great New Yorker essay, Hua Hsu described Pavement affectionately as “pranksters scavenging for meaning at the tail end of rock’s imperial era,” modeling “a weaponized awkwardness, a desire to hold the world at arm’s length.” In one scene from back in the day, a European TV journalist tells him he looks very uncomfortable, and he denies it, very uncomfortably. Malkmus later confesses that interviews were actually part of the reason he bailed on the group. I never interviewed him, but as a longtime music journalist, it sure gave me pause. It was genuinely startling to hear indie-rock’s seemingly all-knowing deadpan poet wiseguy confess to being freaked out over fame.

But I guess it shouldn’t be. Fame’s a weird game, especially in America, and I imagine anyone not freaked out at least somewhat is not paying attention or potentially sociopathic.

The big irony of the film, like the hit careerist send-up “Cut Your Hair” cementing their career — or the old b-side “Harness Your Hopes” earning them their first gold record, thanks to random pimping in a Spotify algorithm and subsequnet TikTok traction — is that songs can and do mean a lot, even when they’re bought and sold.

Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg flips off the mud-slinging crowd at Lollapalooza in West Virginia, 1995, after Pavement’s aborted set.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole — and why not? — there’s another Pavement doc focusing on their madcap OG drummer, Gary Young.

That’ll fill out the picture, or muddy it, I’m honestly not sure. But in the end, the suspicion of certainty is one of the things I always loved about Pavement. And it feels necessary in a moment where there’s a lot of really bad shit being perpetrated by people whose certainty appears unshakable.

Pavements opens today across the United States. If you’re in the New York area, director Alex Ross Perry will speak at a special Film Forum screening tonight. It’s sold out, but he’ll be at the wonderful Upstate Films screening room in Saugerties, NY, on Sunday, and tix for that were still available, last I checked.