Pavements

How best to memorialise the iconic nineties band Pavement? Only this layered meta-documentary will do. Pavements overlaps archival clips with footage from a stage musical, spoof, biopic and pop-up museum – until it becomes hard to tell apart the band from the legend.

Multiple films in one, Pavements mixes together archival clips with footage from several newer projects – of varying authenticity, all masterminded by filmmaker Alex Ross Perry. Fans steal t-shirts from the walls at an opening for a museum dedicated to the band, where real artefacts are mixed in with entirely fake ones. Broadway performers audition and rehearse for a jukebox musical stage play, adding glee club sparkle to Pavement’s notoriously lackadaisical tunes. And Hollywood actors spoof shooting a hammed-up biopic, including Stranger Things’ Joe Keery – who privately panics to his dialect coach that he’s turning into real frontman Stephen Malkmus. As these strands increasingly overlap, it becomes harder to tell apart the band from the legend.

Altogether it’s an appropriate salute to a band known for their stubborn idiosyncrasies: sarcastic irreverence, esoteric lyrics, and ambivalence about success. Never ‘selling out’. As one voice in the film describes, Pavement were the band “for kids who felt like everything was stupid” – but there’s sincerity among the silliness. Squint and you might just capture their oblique, unique brilliance. If not, just let this heady, prismatic cinematic experience wash over you.

– Callum McLean