The New Yorker:

The band Pavement, big in the nineties and bigger in memory, returns to help celebrate themselves wryly in Alex Ross Perry’s loving, metafictional rock-bio-pic parody.

By Richard Brody

Rock documentaries and bio-pics have been parodied for nearly as long as they have existed, but there’s a reason for their ingrained absurdity that’s even weightier than fan service: music rights. Without the coöperation of musicians or of their estates, a music-centered movie risks ending up like Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” and John Ridley’s “Jimi: All Is by My Side,” deprived of the songs crucial to their stories. Hence, hagiography. With “Pavements,” Alex Ross Perry both skirts and embraces the problem: his admiration for the band Pavement is manifest throughout, and his apparent desire isn’t to investigate or to plumb the hidden depths but to celebrate the band—and to do so in a way that exalts its own self-deprecating mode of anti-stardom. The resulting film is a kaleidoscopically shifting—and dazzling—collage of elements that have their irony built in and that, jammed together, meld intense sincerity with self-parody (above all, Perry’s own) in an artificial artifact that nonetheless proves more authentic than a plain and unadorned recording.

The band, which formed in 1989 and broke up in 1999, is fully involved, present not just in archival footage but in new interviews and in sequences that Perry filmed documenting their 2022 reunion tour. But there’s much more to the game. Perry created three Pavement-centric art projects to be featured in the movie: a jukebox musical, “Slanted! Enchanted!,” about which my colleague Holden Seidlitz wrote when it was staged, in 2022; a museum show of the band’s memorabilia, called “Pavements 1933-2022”; and, finally, a movie within the movie, “Range Life,” a spoof bio-pic dramatizing the band’s activities in 1995.

In other words, “Pavements” is the fruit of several years of wry contrivances, pranks, and stunts, and the band plays along with them. The tumultuous results invite hyperbole; Perry talks about the work as a free mashup of a wide variety of rock-centric movies, “a semiotic experiment” that’s also “like throwing spaghetti at the wall,” and I’m looking at an e-mail I sent to a colleague right after seeing the film in which I call it a “quasi-pseudo-mocku-docu-biopic.” But the method to Perry’s—and the band’s—madness becomes apparent if one thinks about another movie, strictly fictional, in which one narrative is shown in a few distinct and giddy incarnations: Jared Hess’s “Gentlemen Broncos,” from 2009.

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