The Bob Dylan Center gathered some 6,000 items from the musician’s archive in an Oklahoma museum. Green Day’s “American Idiot” album was adapted into a Broadway show. The Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” won four Oscars and was nominated for best picture.
If these artists could burnish their legacies and become part of a wider cultural conversation outside of music, then why not Pavement, the beloved ’90s indie-rock band that was about to reunite for its first concerts since 2010?
That’s the animating spirit behind “Pavements,” the director Alex Ross Perry’s audacious documentary about the band, which opens Friday. Perry did, in fact, write and direct a stage show called “Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical” that played for two nights in Manhattan in 2022. A museum touting “rumored relics of the band’s real and imagined history” popped up in TriBeCa that fall, coinciding with the initial Brooklyn run of the group’s (very real, and very successful) reunion tour. And Perry filmed portions of a fictionalized Pavement biopic — starring Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”), Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker, among others — then staged a “premiere” for it in Brooklyn.
“Pavements” covers, clockwise from top left, the band’s reunion tour, a museum of its memorabilia, a made-up Hollywood biopic and a jukebox musical, sometimes presented in split screen.Credit…Utopia
In “Pavements,” all of this is intercut with archival imagery from the band’s history and footage from the reunion tour’s rehearsals and performances, sometimes presented in two-, three- or even four-way split screen. (The plural title is quite literal.) Overall, the effect is about as far from the typical rock documentary as you could get.
“I was told, ‘They want nothing traditional,’” Perry said in a video interview last month, adding that the group’s frontman, Stephen Malkmus, texted him, “‘Avoid the legacy trap.’ Possibly in all capitals.” At this point in the life cycle of Pavement or any other band, Perry said, the question becomes: What else do we do with our story? A documentary, a series, an exhibition, what? “So that, for me, became the actual text of the movie,” he said.