“I’m not sure we should have agreed to this,” Stephen Malkmus muses during the extraordinary new documentary Pavements. “Has there ever been a good movie about a rock band?” There certainly hasn’t been a rock doc like this one, which eschews convention at every stage in favour of meta-realities and roleplay, echoing the band’s own approach on albums like Wowee Zowee. “It’s a sprawling record with lots of different ideas positioning for your attention,” explains guitarist Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg. “The movie is sort of like that. Here's this band… and what’s real and what’s not?”
“I’m not sure we should have agreed to this,” Stephen Malkmus muses during the extraordinary new documentary Pavements. “Has there ever been a good movie about a rock band?” There certainly hasn’t been a rock doc like this one, which eschews convention at every stage in favour of meta-realities and roleplay, echoing the band’s own approach on albums like Wowee Zowee. “It’s a sprawling record with lots of different ideas positioning for your attention,” explains guitarist Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg. “The movie is sort of like that. Here’s this band… and what’s real and what’s not?”
Pavement’s label Matador commissioned the project from director Alex Ross Perry, known for caustically witty, literary films such as 2014’s Listen Up Philip. “Originally when we agreed to have a film made, we didn’t really want to be in it,” says Kannberg. Perry responded with radical, wild substitutions, intercutting an off-Broadway Pavement musical, a deliberately clichéd rock biopic – with Stranger Things’ Joe Keery as an anguished, dickish Malkmus – and a fully operational Pavement museum, with accompanying behind-the-scenes dramas.
“They gave us an unprecedented amount of trust to reinterpret, dement, morph and alter their life story,” Perry tells Uncut. “Not because it’s not worthy of being told traditionally, but because to do so would brutally misunderstand what’s interesting about this band.” Pavement’s unexpected 2022-3 reunion shows added a further layer of actual and staged documentary footage. “The finished product changed with us touring so much and them being able to film it,” says Kannberg. “But I think it makes it all better in the end, because there was such joy playing those shows and from the fans that came.”
The fake biopic scenes go furthest out, focusing on the fraught response to Wowee Zowee, with Jason Schwartzman as Matador founder Chris Lombardi begging Keery’s alienated Malkmus for “100% of the 50% of effort that you feel you may be able to give”. Malkmus failed to see the funny side of an early cut, wondering if it was a “prank”.
“It was a little weird at first,” Kannberg admits. “It portrayed us as this band that we weren’t. But that was the point, I think. We went and saw this fake premiere and some of the band were really confused because it was so far off from what we were. The parts in the movie where all is explained were not woven in yet. It was pretty funny still.”
The band reacted far more positively to the Pavement museum of real and concocted artefacts, which opened for four nights in New York. Kannberg found it surprisingly poignant: “In the context of a museum, it was intense. All the memories came back strong.” Pavements’ mix of real emotion and artifice anyway speaks to the band’s essence. “They ride that dial between irony and sincerity, sometimes within the same song,” says Perry. “Malkmus’s tug of war between disinterest and deep artistic commitment makes him worthy of a film that splits his depictions five different ways.”
The film has refashioned Kannberg’s own perspective on Pavement. “It’s made it a much more important part of my life, I guess,” he says. “For a long time, I couldn’t really appreciate how important Pavement was. The songs became much more emotional and I had way more fun playing them this last tour, and the movie helped me understand this. A good friend that Steve and I grew up with told me once, ‘That band fucked you up, dude.’ I’m pretty sure it fucked me up in the best way, though! And fucked up music is always the best.”
Pavements will stream exclusively on Mubi this summer
