Has there ever been a good movie made about a rock band?” asks Stephen Malkmus in Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s self-questioning, self-critical, unabashedly self-conscious rock music documentary. While Pavements is ostensibly about Pavement, Malkmus’s lo-fi American indie group, it is also – arguably mostly – about the shortfalls and pitfalls of the rockumentary itself. It dismantles the genre, pokes fun at its pomposity, and provides an answer of sorts to Malkmus’s opening question. The best way of making a good movie about a rock band, it suggests, is to make one as deliberately shonky and suspect as possible.
Perry’s film starts as it means to go on, with a caption informing us that Pavement are “the world’s most important and influential band” as opposed to what they were: a 1990s cult act, loved by the few and largely ignored by the rest. Malkmus’s band made hay in the margins and briefly flirted with success before quietly folding at the turn of the century. They had a problematic first drummer who was eventually let go. They caused a minor fracas at Lollapalooza in 1995. They recorded a B-side – “Harness Your Hopes” – that would later go viral on TikTok. In terms of red-blooded drama, that’s pretty much the extent of Pavement’s rock’n’roll saga.
Perry, though, isn’t one to let the facts get in the way of a story. His ambition, he has said, was always to create a “historically inaccurate movie”; one that plays fast and loose with the biographical details and shuffles true-life events with sugar-frosted confections. So Pavements cross-cuts the rehearsals for a recent band reunion with archive footage from its Nineties heyday. However, it also weaves in references to a pop-up Pavement museum and a cheesy jukebox musical (Slanted! Enchanted!), both of which were only developed as part of the movie’s production.
The action centres around the making of a big-screen Oscar-bait biopic (“Pavement to get Bohemian Rhapsody Treatment,” declares one banner headline). And yet Range Life: A Pavement Story turns out to be a complete fabrication. In this distorted parallel movie, Malkmus is played by Stranger Things star Joe Keery. A pivotal scene shows us Jason Schwartzman as record mogul Chris Lombardi, who finds himself driven to a desk-pounding fury by the unalloyed weirdness of Pavement’s three-sided third album. Every creative tension is exaggerated; cranked up to 11. Every anecdote is milked for the maximum drama. Perry doesn’t so much print the legend of Pavement as draft it, rehearse it and then dress it up as a joke.
A cynic would say, when it comes to music sales, there is no such thing as a bad rock documentary. Each new release caters to the existing fanbase of the featured artist while potentially introducing their work to a whole new audience. Each typically results in a 20 per cent bump in music streaming. It doesn’t matter that the bulk of these pictures are bland promos that rehash the old myths, because they’re cheap to produce and easy to sell. They’re industry perennials: the monsters of rockumentary. Most are still built around the same weary lines that This Is Spinal Tap poked fun at back in 1984.
Pavement were playful post-structuralist rockers who liked to point out a song’s gears and levers (“And we’re coming to the chorus now,” Malkmus sings on their 1994 nearly-hit “Gold Soundz”). Perry’s film adopts a similar tack; building itself up only to knock itself down; reminding us that every artist’s biography is basically a tissue of lies. And yet Pavements doesn’t only take its lead from Malkmus’s musicians. It’s influenced by Rob Reiner’s comedy, too, in that it is hyper-aware of documentary cliches and has a horror of taking itself too seriously. What is Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical!, after all, but a descendant of Spinal Tap’s infamous Druid-themed stage show, complete with its disastrous scale model of Stonehenge?
This Is Spinal Tap was inspired by the music documentaries that preceded it, most notably Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978). Scorsese himself was initially annoyed by the film – and specifically by Reiner’s performance as fanboy director Marty Di Bergi – but he’s since revised his opinion, as has most of the world. Reiner’s spoof homage to a fake heavy-metal band was regarded as a punk outlier when it first made its appearance. It’s now an international treasure, recognised by the US Library of Congress and cited as a classic by punters and critics alike. “It’s famous for its sustain,” idiotic Nigel Tufnel says of his cherished electric guitar, although he might just as easily be talking about the movie itself. Spinal Tap casts a long shadow and has spawned a sub-genre of imitators. Its jokes have endured and become a part of the furniture.
How does one make a good music documentary? Possibly it’s by keeping Spinal Tap close at hand – deploying it either as a spirit guide or a hazard sign. Films such as Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008), Bros: After the Screaming Stops (2018), or Ondi Timoner’s Dig (2004) deliberately lean into Reiner’s movie. They mine their material for tragicomic relationships and vainglorious posturing. Films such as Peter Jackson’s Beatles film Get Back (2021) and Questlove’s Summer of Soul (2021) deliberately lean away from it. They ditch the documentary scaffolding to become immersive and inclusive. And then there is Perry’s picture, which manages to have it both ways, dismantling all of the genre conventions to become an exuberant, ongoing exercise in self-satire. Most likely, Pavement were never suited to the documentary format anyway. They were always too knowing and nimble and weird.
Ideally, great retired rock bands would never reform and classic films would be left well alone. However, we live in a world in which Malkmus’s group is now back playing the nostalgia circuit and Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is scheduled for release this September. And while the prospect of a Spinal Tap sequel remains faintly dispiriting, it also feels inevitable, appropriate and probably long overdue. Reiner’s film has spent 40 years as the unofficial father of the modern-day rockumentary. It’s only fitting that it should finally have a child of its own.
‘Pavements’ streams on Mubi from 11 July
