Alex Ross Perry’s Pavement movie flips the name of the indie rock band into the plural, Pavements. It’s fitting given the ambitious scope of the film, which is all at once a documentary and musical with an additional film-inside-the-film accompanied by behind-the-scenes footage of that same film topped off with mockumentary clips to bring it all home. The first official full-length trailer for Pavements fits this content overload into just over two-and-a-half minutes and lays out just how strategic the introduction to Pavements has been. The complete film will premiere in theaters nationwide on June 6.
Earlier this month, a teaser trailer previewed Range Life, a film about the alt-rock greats in which Joe Keery plays Stephen Malkmus. The new clip positions real press coverage of the faux film trailer next to footage of Keery considering why he took the role in the Oscar-bait biopic at all. “It’s good for my career, maybe win an award or something,” he says. “I can’t play Billy Joel.” The Pavement jukebox musical, Slanted! Enchanted!, gets the same treatment as the trailer cuts to headlines of review’s including Rolling Stone‘s declaration: “The Pavement Musical ‘Slanted! Enchanted!’ Is Totally Insane and It Should Run Forever.”
“It just stands as a testament to the fans belief in Pavement Power that the notion of visiting a painstakingly curated Pavement Museum or a lavishly staged Pavement Musical was so logical, so obvious that relatively few people stopped to think if there might be more going on than meets the eye,” Perry said in December 2022. “As is typical with Pavement, and has been for over thirty years, the answer is both yes and no.”
Contributions from Pavement experts, the band members themselves, longtime fans, and more are a testament to the ways in which viewers are willing to suspend all of their disbelief in order to hand themselves over to the film. As mentioned in the trailer, it makes them feel like they’re in on the joke. It doesn’t just poke fun at the traditional rock documentary format — Malkmus’ desire to avoid that route is what led to the trippy approach to Pavements — but it breaks down the barriers of what that’s allowed to look like. All that’s missing is a few CGI animals playing Pavement à la Robbie Williams in Better Man.
“The film is both honest in its love of a band that could be — when Malkmus wasn’t playing onstage autocrat or they weren’t musically colliding into each other — absolutely transcendent live, and yet completely acknowledges that the modern cottage industries around rock-band mythology are, like, so fucking whatever, man,” Rolling Stone‘s David Fear wrote in a review of Pavements following its premiere at the New York Film Festival. “You can feel Perry rolling his eyes at the two-states endeavor while also being extremely good at blending all of this together, sending up the hyperventilating melodrama of Bohemian Rhapsody, et al., and raising his brows at Broadway’s lucrative subgenre of recycled greatest-hits compilations while also delivering something to make fans salivate.”
From Rolling Stone US
