About halfway through Alex Ross Perry's film Pavements, the Stranger Things actor Joe Keery shows his vocal coach a photograph of Stephen Malkmus' open throat. "The music has all come from this place," he says, holding his phone like a relic as he stares into the glistening pink mucous membranes that shaped the sarcastic drawls of Pavement's 1994 single "Cut Your Hair." Keery is working on becoming Malkmus, Method style, right down to the vocal fry, which clings to his own throat even after the cameras have stopped rolling. He is doing so in preparation to star in a Pavement biopic called Range Life, which is not a real movie, but one of several satirical constructs that make up the destabilizing, hilarious Pavements. Perry's hybrid experiment is at once rockumentary and mockumentary — a sincere probe into what makes the '90s indie quintet so enduringly appealing, and a send-up of the overall endeavor to canonize musical acts decades past their peak.
The independent director behind the disillusioned grunge drama Her Smell, Perry first began working with Pavement to direct a music video for "Harness Your Hopes," a 1999 B-side that unexpectedly caught fire on Spotify in 2017 and has since been the soundtrack of multiple TikTok trends. In turn, the band asked Perry to make a feature-length film about them, but they didn't want a documentary and they didn't want a screenplay: The world's most over-it rock band demanded an equally slouchy tribute. Splicing together real archival video, fake documentary footage about the making of a fake biopic, and real conversations with the present-day band, Pavements is delightfully chaotic. It leans heavily on split screens and overlays, bombarding the viewer with up to four different images at the same time: some real, some represented, some ambiguous in their sincerity. Watching it can be an exercise in trying to figure out who is making the joke, who is in on the joke, and who, if anyone, is the unwitting butt. (Tim Heidecker appears as one of the biopic's actors, and his eternal clear-eyed deadpan offers one of the biggest hints for how we're meant to approach the viewing experience.) Pavements is as much about the genuine appreciation the band's members and fans have for Pavement as it is about how slippery and ridiculous it can be to try to fix one's love for music under glass.
By traditional metrics, Pavement never hit it all that big. They never sold out arenas, never bagged a Grammy, and didn't get a gold record until "Harness Your Hopes" took off. They were dyed-in-the-wool critical darlings whose icy ambivalence about the whole business of making rock music garnered them a devoted following among similarly skeptical Gen Xers. They're enough of a cultural touchstone to be name-dropped by a tryhard Ken in Greta Gerwig's Barbie, but can probably still walk down most streets in the world without getting swarmed by fans. Their cultural positioning — important, beloved, but not actually famous — makes them a perfect engine for investigating the uncanny afterlife of music stardom. Pavements asks the audience to suspend disbelief and wonder what it might look like if Pavement were truly one of that era's most defining bands, a Nirvana beyond Nirvana, a Beatles for a tired, wry generation.
In 2022, ahead of a Pavement reunion tour, Perry began work on two of the more hyperreal threads that make up the film: a jukebox musical à la American Idiot and a retrospective gallery exhibit à la David Bowie Is, both of which were mounted for real audiences in New York City that fall. Slanted! Enchanted!, which ran for two nights at the off-Broadway Sheen Center, lacked any kind of apparent plot, instead chaining Pavement songs into a series of choreographed group numbers. Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum displayed both real and fake artifacts from the band's history: real show posters and lyric sheets, a fake "Think Different" Apple ad featuring a photo of Malkmus playing a broom like a guitar. (The real "Think Different" campaign used photographs of John Lennon, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, who, by the '90s, were slightly better known than Pavement.) Finally, Perry started filming scenes for the never-to-be-completed parody Range Life, ticking all the boxes of the tropey music biopic: big fights with record executives, intra-group meltdowns, seraphic shots of the misunderstood Malkmus etching out his sublime and history-defining songs.
Pavements arrives in a prodigious age for high-profile music biopics. In the past seven years, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, Elton John's Rocketman, Elvis' Elvis and Bob Dylan's A Complete Unknown have all debuted to abundant hype and accolades. Many more are to come, including the Bruce Springsteen film Deliver Me From Nowhere and no fewer than four Beatles movies, one for each Liverpool lad. These features promise a close, intimate look at some of the world's most adored artists, dramatizing their tender beginnings and precipitous slides into fame. All popular musicians were once anonymous dreamers, and the music biopic invites its viewers to make the acquaintance of their heroes at an age before real cameras started crowding their faces. Dozens of entries in, it's a phenomenon well primed for pillorying, and Pavements dares ask a long-overdue question: Why does the music movie so often overshoot?
For all their mainstream encomia, the recent rash of music biopics also tend to find themselves the targets of mockery and disdain. And how could they avoid it? They hurtle toward hyperbole as if compelled by gravity. Countless parodies of the "he's white?!" sequence from Baz Luhrmann's Elvis splashed across the internet in the wake of its release, making fun of any and all artists who have ever laundered cultural capital from inauthentic identity markers. Disbelieving Twitter users circulated a scene from Bohemian Rhapsody where the camera cuts from face to face at a staccato clip, all while Queen discusses the rather dry business of promotion with its manager. Auxiliary characters in A Complete Unknown double over with awe at Dylan's songwriting, while every interstitial conversation — in hallways, elevators and hotel rooms — fixates on towering questions of fame, art and creativity. The most mundane, human turns of a recording artist's life unfold at a fever pitch. Everything spills toward glory.
Whether it narrows its scope to a few years of an artist's life like A Complete Unknown or follows a musician from incipience to death like Elvis, the music movie must shoulder the burden of music's disproportionate cultural presence. Other historical figures forge their emotional ties to an audience in short, contained bursts: news clips, acting performances, sports games. But music is a sling for ordinary life. Songs weave through our days and cradle our milestones. No film can simulate the birth of a song most of its viewers have already heard a thousand times, perhaps on some of the most important days of their lives. The music movie takes the overwhelming power of its subject as a starting point and marches backwards into how it all came to be — and so, scenes of ordinary creative labor overflow with historical import. In Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek, as Freddie Mercury, plinks out the opening piano line to the film's eponymous megahit. His girlfriend compliments him on the melody. "I think it has potential," he smirks, awash in dramatic irony. Of course it has potential: It's "Bohemian Rhapsody." It's playing somewhere on a classic rock radio station at this very moment. The song's ubiquity makes it practically impossible to break through to the delicate moment of its emergence, to render it as an embryo, knowing the full life it's lived since.
Festooned with fake noses and joke-shop teeth, the leading actors of these movies wade through oceans of schmaltz. Their hands are heavier than even your standard Oscar bait, dipping into frantic, overcompensatory phantasmagoria where every studio session and business discussion is a moment of splendor, suffused with historical backwash. Some directors have focused this excess to careful points: Todd Haynes split the figure of Bob Dylan into six different personae, each played by a different actor, in his 2007 film I'm Not There, and his 1998 feature Velvet Goldmine tackled the problem of a Bowie biopic by plunging fullheartedly into freewheeling erotic fan fiction. But the vast majority of music biopics pile their sentimentality onto real biographical beats. In the first minutes of A Complete Unknown, the camera practically smothers Chamalet as Dylan when he steps out of the car into 1960s New York City, guitar case in hand, ready to meet the destiny we all know so well.
What happens when the same overbearing lens settles on a band who never met such a destiny? That's the question buzzing at Pavements' comic core. The archival footage that rolls throughout the film presents Malkmus as profoundly undecided on the question of fame. He wants it; he hopes Pavement will tip over into the big leagues; he makes a decent bid for it with the 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and the earwormy "Cut Your Hair." Then, having swung and missed, the band foils its future chances with the languid, three-sided follow-up Wowee Zowee. A scene from Range Life depicts the members of Pavement hunching around a boardroom table while Matador Records executives throw a fit. In a traditional biopic, the band's friction with its label would give way to triumph. Raw genius would pierce the hedged bets of industry moguls. In reality, Wowee Zowee sold about half as many copies as Crooked Rain. The men of Pavement were never so much stewards of raw genius as lackadaisical practitioners of trial and error, faking it until they made it, then faking it some more.
By fabricating mock hagiographies of a band that always shook off its brushes with the industry's worst impulses, Perry invites critical speculation into the real purpose of musical canonization. The biopics, the documentaries, the exhibits, the stage shows — they all sweep up the global adoration of innumerable fans and fix it squarely on the individuals from whom beloved melodies flow. They look at human beings and declare, This is the font of genius. But music is a phenomenon that's tricky to pin to musicians alone. It darts among a web of songwriters, producers, performers, promoters, managers, assistants and fans, all of whose labor gets subsumed, in the music movie, into the singular figure of the star. If those other people show up at all, they're usually antagonists, meddling with the course of natural talent. It is not possible for an actor to play Bob Dylan on the big screen. Bob Dylan is not a person. To be legible within the form, the star of a music biopic must gather up all the industry workings that ever fed into the character at hand and attempt to embody them on set. No wonder these actors land in melodrama: They're trying to force a typhoon into a circulatory system.
There are, of course, real individuals behind the construct of the music star, people who become synonymous with their celebrity projections though they are not one and the same. And these people are, more often than not, just as ambivalent toward the machinery of celebrity as Malkmus is in Pavements. Their faces become icons, but they must still live a human life. No one has spoken more lucidly on this conundrum than Tina Turner, the late, heralded Queen of Rock whose life story has been the subject of all those cultural compulsions Perry satirizes: biopic, documentary, musical, museum. In the 2021 HBO documentary Tina, Turner reflects on the life that gave rise to all that spectacle. "It wasn't a good life. It was in some areas, but the goodness did not balance the bad," she tells her interviewer. Turner survived torture at the hands of her husband and co-performer, Ike. After a stint in the spotlight in the '60s, she fell into obscurity, then navigated an unlikely comeback in the '80s, which cemented her legacy as a foundational pop performer. Her story is taken as inspirational, a testament to her individual resilience and the enduring power of music itself. To hear her tell it, she would have traded it all for a life where no one hurt her.
The music-canonical apparatus superimposes fans' frenzy onto the figure of the pop star until it is too waterlogged to move. Pavements toys with that oversaturation, revealing how seldom music movies tend to be actually about musicians. Instead, they concern the practically religious fervor that a well-promoted musical career stokes in the public: the impulse to turn musicians into saints, suffering and all, to reinscribe the notion that some people are special enough for perfect songs to ring miraculously from their throats. To its credit, and in keeping with its subject, Pavements does let a little light creep through the cracks in that sardonic outer shell. At the gallery opening, Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail covers "Starlings of the Slipstream" with so much glee that she falls over laughing on the floor. Backstage at one of the reunion shows, the band reorganizes its setlist upon learning that guitarist Scott Kannberg's young daughter really wants to hear "Cut Your Hair." Pavement doesn't just belong to the people in the band; its devotees are not passive recipients of a contained vector of genius. Everyone who hears the music and feels anything at all becomes a part of it. Everyone gets caught up in the rush.
Pavements opens wide on June 6.
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