Catching Pavements at the newly rebranded Departure Festival, formerly Canadian Music Week, now reborn as a full-spectrum pop culture extravaganza spanning music, tech, film, comedy, felt like stumbling into a portal where indie rock mythology collides with meta-mockumentary madness. The thought of seeing a movie about ‘90s rockers Pavement was immediately intriguing. As a bonus, there was a Q&A with director Alex Ross Perry afterwards, who, in true indie auteur form, looked equal parts caffeinated and reverent while fielding questions from a room full of longtime Pavement devotees and new converts alike at the Hotel X cinema.
On paper, Pavements starts off like your garden-variety rock doc, but Perry pulls the rug out and throws the formula on its head, and not in a self-indulgent film school way. What unfolds is a This Is Spinal Tap-meets-The Office fever dream that gleefully bends reality, reimagining Pavement’s modest cult status as something so much more. Insert the band in the midst of launching a 2022 reunion tour while simultaneously preparing to be immortalized in a fictional biopic, a trendy pop-up museum dedicated to their career, and a hilariously off-key Broadway-style jukebox musical.
The joke, of course, is on the industry. The film pokes fun at the idea that a band’s critical acclaim can be marketable if you dress it up with the right brand of nostalgia and hot young actors. The film within a film, Range Life: A Pavement Story, features rising actors Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman and Fred Hechinger as the band members. One scene that had the audience in stitches featured Keery (star of Stranger Things and also known as chart-topping musician Djo) in a therapy moment, feeling as if he was losing himself and becoming Stephen Malkmus. The film even pokes fun at the For Your Consideration awards-bait move of casting acting heavyweight Jason Schwartzman as the band’s manager. Every time Pavements cuts to footage of the auditions or rehearsal of the musical (think talent show style auditions and earnest jazz hands renditions of Pavement’s most beloved songs), the crowd in the screening at Hotel X also erupted to uncontrollable laughter.
But make no mistake: underneath the satire is real affection. Perry, known for his precise, sometimes prickly tone (Her Smell, hello?), is clearly in awe of the band and a legitimate fan. With plenty of archival footage and Easter eggs sprinkled in for longtime fans, it all plays out like a love letter to a band that never asked for mass adoration but, in Perry’s universe, gets it anyway. By the time the credits rolled, the film had done something kind of miraculous: it made you laugh, it made you wince, and it reminded you why Pavement mattered in the ‘90s, still matters (Gen Z has really taken to Pavement’s b-sde “Harness Your Hopes”), in a world that often forgets the value of being weird, awkward, and quietly revolutionary.
Pavements is coming soon to Mubi Canada.
