“For youths who felt like every little thing was silly and every little thing sucked, they have been your band.” It’s laborious to high that summation of Pavement’s enchantment from comic and musician Tim Heidecker. Wildly ingenious, weirdly catchy, and perversely self-defeating, the seminal indie-rock group of the Nineteen Nineties enraptured critics, flummoxed the mainstream document business, and irritated the grunge crowd, with one group of moshing goons in West Virginia going as far as to pelt them with mud throughout a Lollapalooza set. The assailants have been most likely considering what the cartoon burnouts Beavis and Butt-Head mentioned over one among Pavement’s few MTV-friendly movies: “Attempt more durable!”
For these of us of a sure age who felt that making an attempt laborious sucked and was silly, Pavement will at all times be one of many best bands of all time. Kurt Cobain could have sung, “Oh effectively, no matter, by no means thoughts,” however Pavement entrance man Stephen Malkmus lived it. Type of. He swears that the group truly did their greatest to achieve success; they simply had a humorous approach of going about it. Like, say, by no means together with what would turn into their hottest track on any album. It took Spotify, after which TikTok, to show the B-side “Harness Your Hopes” into the uncommon anthem that unites Gen X and Gen Z.
In his new movie Pavements, premiering tomorrow on the 2024 Venice Movie Pageant, Alex Ross Perry (Her Scent, Pay attention Up Philip) takes a kaleidoscopic strategy to capturing the band’s shambolic magic. He’d been approached by Matador Data, Pavement’s longtime label, to make a movie on one situation: It couldn’t be “cookie cutter.” As he thought-about the supply, Perry says, he thought, “You’re solely going to get to make one Pavement film. This isn’t Scorsese attending to make his fourth and fifth Dylan movie. So why don’t I simply make each Pavement film that I, as a fan, would ever need to watch—or hate-watch.”
Backside: Pavement, from left: Mark Ibold, Steve West, Scott Kannberg, Bob Nostanovich, Stephen Malkmus. High: “Pavement,” from proper: Joe Keery, Fred Hechinger, Nat Wolff, Griffin Newman, Logan Miller.Backside: Michael Wong. High: Donald Stahl.
The result’s a nonlinear pastiche of archival music-doc (hinging on that notorious Lollapalooza present), fly-on-the-wall footage of 2022 reunion-tour rehearsals, and three fictional or quasi-fictional parts: a pop-up Pavement museum present combining actual and pretend memorabilia (no, Steve Jobs didn’t enlist Malkmus to pose for an Apple “Suppose Completely different” advert); a jarringly honest jukebox musical that includes the star of American Fool, which actually was staged in New York Metropolis; and a completely phony “Oscar-worthy biopic” starring Joe Keery as Malkmus, Nat Wolff as Pavement cofounder Scott Kannberg, and Jason Schwartzman and Heidecker as Matador bosses Chris Lombardi and Gerard Cosloy. (Oh, and…I’m in it too? Briefly. In a clip from our 2019 dialog on the 92nd Road Y.)
On this unique scene, we get a glimpse of the fictional biopic. In opposition to their will, Pavement have agreed to hitch the Lollapalooza tour. They haven’t been pelted with mud but, however they’re depressing all the identical. Then, Lombardi and Cosloy name Malkmus with probably life-changing information: The band has been invited to play Saturday Evening Reside! Malkmus says he’d favor to not.
I needed to ask Perry: Did this actually occur? “Each music biopic is mixing the connection between historical past and fiction,” he replies. “If you happen to suppose the scenes in these films occurred, you’re a idiot. It is a composite scene. We don’t want to point out the seven issues he turned down, so we simply mix all of them into turning down the largest factor that by no means obtained provided.” The notion of an SNL supply itself got here from Lombardi, who informed Perry it was the sort of factor Malkmus would have nixed. “The defeat was that you just weren’t going to get this factor to begin with,” Lombardi mentioned. “And the defeat once more was when the band mentioned no.”
