Pavements – Reviewed

Biopic, mock-doc, juke box musical, exhibition? Mike Pinnington considers director Alex Ross Perry’s documentary, Pavements… 

Ambivalent, ironic, alienating. There is a prolonged moment at the beginning of director Alex Ross Perry’s documentary, Pavements, where you get a sense of what it must have been like as an unwitting 1990s music journo to interview Stephen Malkmus and his band, Pavement.

It feels, initially, impenetrable. And, it occurs to you, the next couple of hours could be difficult. Biopic, mock-doc, juke box musicals, exhibition; it’s hard to settle, to find the truth at the core of the film. What’s real, what’s not? Was that a sidelong glance and a wink at those who consider themselves to be in the know? Or, like the band’s critics have sometimes alleged, simply post-modern sleight of hand wind up. And, when you get Joe Keery (Stranger Things’ Steve Harrington) going full method in the ‘lead role’, it is in some way akin to watching a feature-length episode of Portlandia. Like Malkmus himself, then, perhaps arch is the best descriptor.

Ride out those challenging first scenes and things begin to take shape – albeit in unconventional fashion. After all, Pavement were never conventional. Better this than a typical, by-the-numbers beginning, middle and end telling of their tale. For the uninitiated, Pavement (Malkmus, co-founding member Spiral Stairs/Scott Kannberg, Mark Ibold, Steve West and Bob Nastanovich) formed in 1989, and are, for my money (and others’ besides), the band of their generation. By the time they come to prominence, grunge is over and the industry is looking for something, someone, anyone to fill the void. Pavement, if briefly, are the anointed ones. Kings of an undefined movement, they’ve toured with Sonic Youth and have the seal of approval from pretty much anyone that matters.

But there’s a problem. Well, problems. Not least, Malkmus especially is hung up on not being seen to sell out; even, it’s speculated, to the point of self-sabotage. Meanwhile, their off-kilter style is lampooned, in one case brilliantly, by MTV’s Beavis and Butthead, who wonder whether or not the band could be trying harder: “I want you to start over again, and this time try!”

The crux, though, is that the industry is only so forgiving. Only extends its hand for so long. And when Pavement deliver 1995’s three-sided opus, Wowee Zowee, it’s met with something akin to a bemused comparative shrug, suffering perhaps, as Malkmus points out, from the selection of slow burn singles, Rattled by the Rush, and Father to a Sister of Thought (in hindsight, this reception is bizarre: it was and remains a brilliant record).

It is during this, one of, let’s be honest, a few difficult moments in the band’s lifespan (see Malkmus’ increasing dissatisfaction with with life in Pavement, and his my-way-or-the-highway approach, the stuff with Billy Corgan, for instance), that the film comes into its own. By now you’re used to Ross Perry’s non-linear, non-traditional approach to telling the story of Pavement. So, when we’re presented with over-simplified fictionalised scenes juxtaposed with archive footage – interviews, performances, etc. – the result perhaps allows us to better speculate on internal wranglings.

This method is particularly effective in depicting the band’s ignominious appearance at 1995′s Lollapalooza, faced with a dead-end 3pm slot. Dead, that is, apart from those slinging mud from the front row. Pavement, understandably, down tools (although reports at the time have it that they were at fault). There is an alignment between Malkmus’ forlorn response to one-mud-pat-too-many slung in his direction and Keery’s performance, one of reflected fury, and a sinking in of the kind of pressure the band might have laboured under to fill the vacuum left in the popular consciousness by Nirvana (following the 1994 death of Kurt Cobain).

Little by little, Pavements draws you in. Or lets you in, I’m not sure which. Rather than obfuscate, the chicanery of the film works as a story-telling device, allows us to consider the feelings of its subjects, who, for the best part of their on-again-off-again careers, have kept the press and the fans alike largely at a remove.

So, when it comes to the denouement, coinciding with the opening in New York of the pop-up exhibition, Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum, it is with delight that we see the band’s reactions. There are broad smiles, teary eyes. Even Malkmus struggles to remain aloof when faced with the celebration of this band that (try as he might) wouldn’t die.

They come face to face – via ephemera, artwork, hand-written notes and lyrics – with Pavements past (including the clothes they wore, still covered in mud, at their ill-fated Lollapalooza appearance); contemporary bands Bully, Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail and Speedy Ortiz play covers of canonical, bonefide indie-classics; and, ooh, there’s Thurston Moore. Maybe, as a longtime fan, I got carried away, lost objectivity, but with Pavements, Ross Perry (who has said that the music documentary format has “run out of gas”) brings us closer to Pavement than other attempts, or at least reveals another perspective. It’s nice, after all of the artifice, to see the human side.

Mike Pinnington

Pavements screens 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool, Wednesday 9 July 

Images/media, from top: Pavements artwork; Official video for Cut Your Hair; Malkmus/Lollapalooza, 1995