Alex Ross Perry’s Musical Portrait Debuts at Venice

You don’t have to be a major fan of Pavement, or director Alex Ross Perry, to enjoy his exhaustive and enthusiastic two-hour-plus love letter to the beloved ’90s alt-rock band. But it certainly helps.

This multifaceted meta-movie is at once documentary, musical comedy, faux biopic and real museum exhibition. In its attempts to capture the quintessence of a much appreciated but never all that famous indie group, it throws in everything but the kitchen sink — including vintage muddied t-shirts from Lollapalooza 1995.

And yet, with its onslaught of footage both old and new, staged and captured live, split-screened, chopped and screwed, Pavements oftentimes seems to be preaching to the choir more than trying to win over or welcome new admirers. It’s something of a sincere if self-indulgent inside joke about a band that always had a strong undercurrent of irony, whether about itself or the music business. At some point, the film winds up part of the Pavement myth, too.

If that was the goal of Perry, who previously explored the alternative rock scene in his blistering portrait of a female singer, Her Smell, then he’s gone above and beyond what most filmmakers would do to depict their favorite band on screen.  

Not only does he painstakingly document the group’s many weeks of rehearsals leading up to its successful and still ongoing 2022 reunion tour, he also writes and stages an off-Broadway musical, Slanted! Enchanted!, that transforms Pavement’s greatest hits into show-stopping song-and-dance numbers performed by a dedicated ensemble of New York actors.

And then he starts to direct an actual biopic — more a spoof on Bohemian Rhapsody than an Alex Ross Perry movie — with actual Hollywood casting including Jason Schwartzman (who starred in the director’s Listen Up Philip) and Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, the latter as Pavement’s witty and abrasive frontman, Stephen Malkmus.

The scenes of Keery trying to embody Malkmus’ essence — up to taking a photograph of the rocker’s tongue to study its shape, in an effort to better imitate his suburban California accent — are among the film’s more fascinating moments. But they probably reveal more about Perry’s process of working with actors than anything about Malkmus, who was always a man of few words when he wasn’t writing songs or performing on stage.

Indeed, there’s something altogether impenetrable about Pavement’s shaggy, brilliant lead man, which may explain some of the fascination the band has held over the years. Unlike fellow ’90s frontman Kurt Cobain, whose suicide would seal his legacy, or the more media-savvy Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins (a band Pavement feuded with in its heyday), both Malkmus and his group tended to eschew public scrutiny. They just wanted to play music and have lots of fun. Screw the rest of it.

In true Pavement fashion, Perry avoids your typical VH1 Behind the Music treatment of their backstory. There are no rock critics, pop culture experts or industry execs to unpack what made the band one of the more respected ensembles of its day — though titles do point out that their first three albums (Slanted and Enchanted, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Wowee Zowee) all appear on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.

It’s an impressive feat for a group that was never a household name, despite releasing one hit single (“Cut Your Hair”) that topped the alternative charts in 1994. But even in that song, Malkmus mocked musical stardom rather than embracing it, sardonically shouting “career” over and over again in its final verse, as if to eliminate the notion for good.

And indeed, Pavement never skyrocketed after that moment. There were no hits on their third album, which is now cherished by fans but received less enthusiastic reviews at the time. And then there was the band’s disastrous Lollapalooza ’95 appearance, where they walked off stage during one show after being pelted with mud by an angry mosh pit.

Perry chronicles these key moments through archive footage or scenes fictionalized in his biopic-in-the-making (called Range Life, like the Pavement song), and often juxtaposes past and present through split-screen or multiscreen formats (cut together by his regular editor, Robert Greene). There are also real or fake artifacts from the band’s history on display in a New York gallery show, also called Pavements — not to mention a bunch of younger bands performing Pavement covers at the opening.

It’s a lot — truly, a lot — to take in. Instead of administering all of this material with care, the filmmaker tends to bombard us with it to the point of fatigue, for over two hours. There’s an argument to be made that the best Pavement film would simply show them performing a full concert, whereas Perry never quite lets a single song play out in its entirety. His approach is one of a consummate enthusiast and completist, and he does manage to convey that dedicated fan energy on screen. But he doesn’t necessarily make it feel contagious enough.