“Pavements is a World View”
Laurel Westrup (UCLA)
When I first met one of my best friends in high school, I loathed him. He was arrogant, aloof, and judgmental. However, my opinion changed when I discovered that he loved the indie band Pavement as much I did. Perhaps his arrogance was actually a wickedly funny penchant for snark, the aloofness a rejection of the status quo, and the judgment…well, that was really discernment, wasn’t it? Pavement wasn’t just a band, after all. It was a world view. And we weren’t the only ones who shared it. Pavement tribalism extends far and wide, from the Wowee Zowee poster proudly displayed behind sports commentator Mina Kimes whenever she’s on screen to the most snobbish Ken name-dropping the band in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023). What do we share? At the very least, a sardonic Gen X attitude toward pop culture that often manifests in disdain for slickly commercial schlock. Since many music documentaries fit this description, some in the Pavement tribe (myself included) were apprehensive when Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements was announced. It’s no coincidence that Vulture’s Nate Jones framed his dispatch from the film’s premier at the 2024 Venice Film Festival as a Q&A for anxious Pavement fans. But we needn’t have worried. Pavements is far from the typical celebrity-centered music doc. Like the band at its center, it’s messy, cynical, playful, and, ultimately, thought-provoking.
Pavements is not only or exactly a music documentary. Rather, it’s an extravaganza that interposes several different productions, often in split-screen. Early in the film, a title card tells us that as the band prepares for and embarks on a 2022 reunion tour, they will also be celebrated in “a jukebox musical set to their tunes, a museum devoted to their history, and a big budget Hollywood biopic.” All three of these projects were helmed by Perry and conceived purely for the film, though they vary in their degree of reality: the biopic, starring Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus, exists only in Pavements, while the musical, Slanted! Enchanted! and the museum exhibit, Pavements 1933-2022 (which included both real and fake artifacts) did have short runs in New York. Pavements incorporates behind-the-scenes and “finished” footage of these events, as well as archival and contemporary footage of the band. As Jordan Mintzer of Hollywood Reporter, one of the film’s more skeptical critics, notes, “It’s a lot — truly, a lot — to take in.” He’s not wrong. But I disagree with Mintzer’s take that Perry bombards us haphazardly with material. True, Pavements is not your average bio-documentary (those looking for more approachable Pavement content might check out Lance Bangs’ 2002 Slow Century DVD release). Rather, the film tries to convey something deeper about Pavement’s ethos and cultural impact. It might be messy, but that’s kind of the point. And there is method to Perry’s and editor Robert Greene’s madness.
For one, the film explores what it means to succeed as a band who never really experienced any mainstream success (outside of going viral on TikTok 20 years after they broke up) but has had a dedicated following for over thirty years. On the one hand, Pavement is, as several tongue-in-cheek title cards throughout the film proclaim, “the world’s most important and influential band.” At the same time, Perry frames them as a band who were poised to make it big (Nirvana big!) and never achieved that level of success (fake platinum records in the museum exhibit aside). Several versions of Pavement’s song “Here” weave through the film, with its plaintive lines, “I was dressed for success / But success it never comes.” Some would argue that success eluded Pavement because of their famously lackadaisical attitude, and the biopic footage plays up the band’s slacker reputation. As Jason Schwartzman, playing Chris Lombardi of Matador Records, says to Keery’s Malkmus, “I know that you want to give 100% of that 50% that you think you might be able to give.” But the film also includes more sincere moments that pull back the curtain on this laissez-faire façade. In a heartbreaking interview, guitarist Scott Kannberg (better known as Spiral Stairs) confesses that he was down on his luck and applying to become a bus driver when Malkmus called him up to pitch Pavement’s previous reunion tour in 2010.These tonal shifts are by design. As Greene, who is reportedly a huge Pavement fan, told Variety, “The band uses all these super self-aware references… and is super ironic in that way and also deeply sincere at the same time… it was like, that’s exactly what we could do here. We could be ironic and sincere, exactly like what it feels like to listen to a Pavement record.” The tensions between selling out and remaining independent, between success and failure, between sincerity and artifice, thread through the film, and these tensions allow Pavements to capture the complexities of the band. Pavement was never one-dimensional, as the title of the film suggests, and their messiness is one of the things that has always endeared them to fans.
Consequently, while Perry and Greene endeavor to give Pavement the megastar treatment of popular music documentaries and biopics, they simultaneously send up these forms at every turn. As scholar Michael Brendan Baker has argued, music documentaries have proliferated since the turn of the millennium, and yet they have rarely broken with a limited set of conventions. While digital production has led to some experimentation, he maintains that “rockumentary is a decidedly conservative generic form in terms of its visual style and narrative structures.” Similarly, musical biopics are generally highly formulaic and seldom offer true insights into an act. Perry told MUBI (where the film is currently streaming) that both he and Malkmus wanted to avoid the typical hagiographic bio-documentary that “just boringly [hits] the prominent beats of a career.” Pavements gives viewers those beats but also calls attention to how they are constructed. A key sequence focuses on the band’s apocryphal 1995 Lollapalooza performance in Virginia, where they were pelted with mud, stones, and beer bottles by a rowdy audience before walking off stage mid-set. As they come off stage, Perry goes to split screen. On the left, we see the biopic version of the band’s backstage conversation: an overly dramatic heart-to-heart between the members as they perform a premature career post-mortem. On the right, we see archival footage of the band backstage. Some have changed clothes, while some are still muddy, but they are laughing, goofing around, and seem generally unperturbed. While the biopic Pavement searches for answers, the archival Pavement couldn’t care less. Perry and Greene seem to suggest that the truth lies somewhere in between.
Pavements’ hybrid production is especially apt for its subject: a band that was always proudly difficult to pin down. As Greene told Polina Grechanikova at Venice, Malkmus’s “refusal to conform is inspiring, especially in a world where everything feels corporate. He had integrity, and that’s what we wanted to show in the film—how the band’s big ideas resonate with people who appreciate them.” This approach obviously wouldn’t work for just any act, but the film’s critique of boringly conventional rockumentaries and music biopics resonates perfectly with the Pavement tribe’s world view. Beyond our bratty club, Pavements points the way to a more bespoke approach to telling stories about musicians, their music, and their cultural impact. By rethinking what a music documentary (or a music film, more broadly) might be, Perry and Greene demonstrate that musical storytelling can transcend clichés or, at the very least, skewer them.
“Stephen’s tongue: Pavements and the complexity of voice”
Seth Mulliken (Northeastern University)
Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements (2024) has a certain inscrutability. It “documents” the production of three different Pavement projects: a “big-budget Hollywood biopic” of the band, starring Joe Keery as lead singer and guitarist Stephen Malkmus, rehearsals for a jukebox musical called Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, and a touring museum exhibition called “Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum.” The latter two existed; the musical, directed by Perry, played for two nights in NYC in December of 2022, and the exhibition toured the world in fall of 2022. The biopic, however, is a parody, and never existed outside of the scenes shot for Pavements. Pavement lyrics are often defined by their ironic, deadpan humor, and as it is tuned to the same key, Pavements makes no formal distinction between the satirical biopic scenes and the actual rehearsal footage of the jukebox musical. There’s a subtle absurdity to the biopic scenes, but the rehearsals for the musical are equally wacky. The impossibility of delineating “truth” from “fiction” serves to align the documentary’s methods with the themes threaded through Pavement’s lyrics, and fulfills Perry’s description of Pavements as a “semiotic experiment.” But Pavements is more than an experiment in post-modern truth. Like many great documentaries, it seeks to reveal the mechanics of cultural production that are otherwise shrouded in myth and fantasy, and through this revelation, it encourages a critical, active stance.
The biopic segments of Pavements devote a great deal of screen time to Keery’s preparation as an actor learning to sing, play guitar, and speak like Malkmus. In a key scene, Keery works with a vocal coach to analyze and capture Malkmus’ Stockton, CA accent. They discuss the shape of Malkmus’ mouth as he talks, his vocal fry, and the “tightness” of his throat. Keery laconically adds, “I feel like it would be possible to get a picture of Stephen’s tongue. It would be super helpful to know just what it looks like.” Obviously played for deadpan laughs, in this moment Keery and Pavements are gesturing toward larger questions that are too-often taken for granted in the production of musician biopics. Keery wants to see Malkmus’ tongue because somewhere inside Stephen Malkmus’ throat is the key to embodying Malkmus, to quite literally putting Malkmus’ voice inside Keery’s own body. In this way, Pavements makes visible the mechanics of a very specific type of actorly preparation process endemic to recent musician biopic films.
Indeed, several recent musician biopics feature a lead actor who undertakes rigorous training to play a well-known musician. Consider Austin Butler in Elvis (2023), Jeremy Allen White in Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025), and Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown (2024); for each of these films, the actor learned to both sing and speak as their subject: Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan, respectively. Further, there was a significant amount of press and promotion that emphasized the amount of work that went into each actor’s preparation. The director of Elvis, Baz Luhrmann, posted test footage on his Twitter account in 2022 that provided evidence that Butler sang Elvis’ songs in the film. Luhrmann captioned the footage: “Even before his two years of vocal studies I feel that Austin is channeling the vocal qualities of Elvis.” Jeremy Allen White spoke of the year-long process of learning to both sing and speak like Springsteen. And Chalamet has spoken many times about his four years of learning to speak and sing as Dylan, notably in a 2024 interview with Zane Lowe. It is this process of actor preparation that Pavements satirizes.
Later in Pavements, Keery meets again with his vocal coach, having now taken a picture of Stephen Malkmus’ mouth. After lamenting that Malkmus’ tongue isn’t in the image, Keery ruminates philosophically on the source of Malkmus’ voice. “It’s cool to think about that all the music and all the work that I’ve been doing comes from this place,” Keery muses as he points to the wide-open throat.
The “work” he emphasizes is the same type of process outlined by the actors above, involving vocal coaches, archival materials, years of practice and development. Also like the anecdotes about Butler and Chalamet, Keery points to something stranger, almost supernatural. Luhrmann uses the word “channeling” when discussing Butler’s Elvis voice, and Chalamet refers to his work as “spirit gathering.” After looking at the mouth, Keery grows worried, fearful that he won’t be able to leave “SM” (Stephen Malkmus) behind because he’s been living in Malkmus’ voice. Pavements lays bare the odd intersection between the laborious mechanical process of learning to speak as someone else through study, practice, and repetition with something more spiritual, almost like possession or inhabitation. And like the films above, this intersection is underwritten through a hyper-focus on the material body itself. Keery’s interest in Malkmus’ mouth and tongue is a satirical turn on White using Springsteen’s own guitar and clothing in Deliver Me From Nowhere or Chalamet’s concern with “hearing his arm moving in his singing voice” as he plays guitar in a scene from A Complete Unknown. Using Malkmus’ mouth, Keery and Pavements literalize the implication of this intersection of mechanical labor and the spiritual. The voice, and by extension, the “essence,” of a famous musician is to be found in the body of that musician. Through enormous efforts to replicate how they speak and sing, the voice of the musician will come to inhabit the body of the actor.
It is helpful here to turn to the work of Nina Sun Eidsheim, who critiques the idea that “[b]ecause voice arises from inside the body, quotidian discourse tends to refer to someone’s vocal sounds as inborn, natural, and a true expressions of the person.” To Eidsheim, voice is “in reality a composite of visual, textural, discursive, and other kinds of information” and that the “[t]he vocal, material body is always already formed by the cultural and social context within which it vocalizes.” The process suggested by Chalamet et al. is built on the assumption that the “voice” of Bob Dylan is inborn and natural, but through extensive physical effort and attention to the body, that “voice” can come to inhabit another body. Viewers of A Complete Unknown are assured through this process that we are getting as close to the “essence” of Bob Dylan as possible. Pavements reveals this assumption as reductive, one that neglects the cultural contexts in which voice is produced.
It is partly through Pavements’ use of deadpan absurdist humor that this critique is realized. Keery’s dispassionate delivery and tone of slight melancholy serves to highlight the ridiculousness of, for example, studying Malkmus’ tongue. But like Pavement’s songs, close attention to seemingly minor elements opens up much larger ideas. In addition to the humor of the biopic segments, the aforementioned inscrutability and the dubious “reality” of the material the film presents encourage us to delve further into the ways Pavements defines “voice” as not reducible to the vocal sounds that come from Malkmus’ body. For example, the scene with Keery wanting to get a picture of Malkmus’ tongue is edited between two scenes of rehearsals for the Slanted! Enchanted! musical which feature a range of voices singing, dancing to, and commenting on Pavement songs. The film has a great deal of live footage of Pavement, and in these shows, Malkmus is not the only member of Pavement who sings. And the film often uses a split-screen technique bring recent performances by Pavement into parallel with rehearsals of the musical and scenes staged for the biopic. These examples, all of which are presented as part of the “voice” of the band Pavement, encourage questions on the complex, diverse, highly dynamic, and historically specific ways the documentary presents a musician’s voice as inhabiting shared social spaces, both real and fictional, while at the same time challenging essential assumptions of the voice and the body.
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