Has there ever been a good movie made about a rock band?” asks Stephen Malkmus in Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s self-questioning, self-critical, unabashedly self-conscious rock music documentary. While Pavements is ostensibly about Pavement, Malkmus’s lo-fi American indie group, it is also – arguably mostly – about the shortfalls and pitfalls of the rockumentary itself. It dismantles the genre, pokes fun at its pomposity, and provides an answer of sorts to Malkmus’s opening question. The best way of making a good movie about a rock band, it suggests, is to make one as deliberately shonky and suspect as possible.
Perry’s film starts as it means to go on, with a caption informing us that Pavement are “the world’s most important and influential band” as opposed to what they were: a 1990s cult act, loved by the few and largely ignored by the rest. Malkmus’s band made hay in the margins and briefly flirted with success before quietly folding at the turn of the century. They had a problematic first drummer who was eventually let go. They caused a minor fracas at Lollapalooza in 1995. They recorded a B-side – “Harness Your Hopes” – that would later go viral on TikTok. In terms of red-blooded drama, that’s pretty much the extent of Pavement’s rock’n’roll saga.
