“Music scene is crazy/Bands start up each and every day,” singer Stephen Malkmus drawled on Pavement’s sardonic 1994 alt-rock hit “Cut Your Hair”. In 2025, the same could be said of rock documentaries. An avalanche of films about every conceivable band’s rise and fall fills cinema and TV schedules, streaming platforms, even entire festivals such as London’s Doc’n Roll.
Pavement, the most unshowy and self-effacing of indie slacker bands, seem unlikely candidates for such aggrandising cinematic treatment. The Californians — who last recorded together in 1999, but reached a new generation when their song “Harness Your Hopes” became a TikTok hit in 2020 — were known for ironic, laconic anthems and authentic, burnished musical beauty.
It’s no surprise, then, that they were less than enthused when their label Matador came to them with the idea of a film. As its director Alex Ross Perry recalls: “They initially asked: ‘Can we make this movie with us doing very little?’” This left him to take a radically different tack to the norm.
“Pavement range from sincere lyrics a kid might write on their arm if they’re feeling sad to abstract, goofy nonsense,” says Perry, whose witty, literary features include Listen Up Philip (2014). “The movie finds a way to address that.”
Pavements ambitiously meets this dichotomy in three ways, all of them hilariously counter to the band’s ethos. Perry stages an off-Broadway Pavement musical, complete with Glee-style song covers and choreography; a Pavement museum exhibition combining genuine and fake artefacts; and a satirically bad biopic starring Stranger Things’ Joe Keery as Malkmus. These are intercut with real archive footage and scenes from the band’s 2022 reunion tour.
The ersatz musical, Slanted! Enchanted!, typifies the approach. Its cast rehearsed earnestly, then performed sold-out shows to fans. “I wanted the performers and audiences to think I was putting on an hour-long show, so the 10 per cent in the movie has a sense of truth and reality,” Perry says of this seemingly redundant effort. “This has nothing to do with Pavement. This is just this fourth-dimensional concept of filmmaking that the entire project allowed me to experiment with.” Eschewing convention at every stage, it’s the Synecdoche, New York of rock docs, echoing Charlie Kaufman’s meta-masterpiece about a maddened theatre director in its redundant antechambers and obsessively layered realities.
The fake biopic element particularly baffled the real band, who appeared not to be in on the joke when they were invited to its “premiere”, having previously paid little attention to Perry’s project. Malkmus watched the supposedly method-acting Keery portraying his (meticulously researched) histrionic meltdowns. During a post-screening Q&A designed to lend further verisimilitude, the nonplussed singer asked if it was “intentionally bad”. Perry believes the band had never watched the kinds of biopics he was parodying. “One of them said, ‘Why would anybody ever make a movie like that about us?’” Perry recalls. This was his very intention. “Why would anybody make a movie like this about anybody?” he ponders. “That’s the question the movie’s asking.”
Pavements is the most elaborate of a growing number of rock documentaries breaking from the pack to engage with the music’s penchant for invented identities, dangerous excess and hyper-real excitement, preferring mystery and musical overload to clichéd clips, talking heads and dry facts. This was ridiculed as far back as Rob Reiner’s mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984), drawing its biggest laughs from the barely exaggerated reality of its mid-level British heavy metal band on the slide. Later this year, the long-anticipated Spinal Tap II: The End Continues will follow the hapless rockers’ farewell show — echoing the real-world one played by Black Sabbath last weekend.
Reiner’s portrayal of fawning interviewer Marty Di Bergi in the original was a parody of Martin Scorsese’s role in The Last Waltz (1978). Scorsese’s rock docs since then (Shine a Light on the Rolling Stones, George Harrison: Living in the Material World) have also been mostly conventional. The glaring exception is the tricksy Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019), which recounts the singer’s quixotic 1975 tour of small-town America but interweaves invented elements including fake narratives and interviews — even a phoney director. “I wanted the picture to be a magic trick,” Scorsese has said. “I’m talking about a kind of transformation that you experience from watching this . . . [The tour] was an extraordinary, surrealistic experience which made you question what is truth . . . and maybe fraudulence is important, for us to see things another way.” The director took his lead from Dylan, who dismissed the very idea of accurately recalling events from decades ago.
Pavement too reconciled themselves to Perry’s playful twisting of truth and reality once they saw Pavements’ disparate elements come together. Guitarist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg particularly relished walking through the exhibition in New York, where mementos from his collection jostled with forgeries. “I love the finished film,” he says. “It’s our Spinal Tap.”
There have been other recent attempts to use unconventional methods in documenting the histories of iconic bands. Among the best is Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground (2021), which immerses us in the wider 1960s New York counterculture that birthed the band. He all but ignores the Velvets’ music for 45 minutes, instead glorying in the underground cinemas where filmmakers, painters and musicians swapped ideas.
Brett Morgen employed a maximally immersive method in his kaleidoscopic David Bowie tribute Moonage Daydream (2022), which was sanctioned by the singer’s estate and released in Imax. A gold mine of previously unseen archive material, it reinforces the debt such films owe to pioneering contemporary chroniclers such as DA Pennebaker, director of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Morgen, though, sends the footage into overdrive, saturating its colours, splintering it according to Bowie’s own cut-up tenets and recomposing the pieces into a senses-pounding collage, approximating what it might have been like in Bowie’s mind during his relentless series of musical changes.
The power of formal leaps is further proved by Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece (2024), a soft-focused account of Pharrell Williams’ relatively dull pop career that is enhanced by being told as a Lego cartoon. “This is the best way I can really be my purest self without feeling weird,” Williams declares. His synaesthesia is also reflected in Lego’s psychedelically vivid colours, with its bricks representing sounds. This left-field, digitally enabled form finds a dramatised counterpart in Michael Gracey’s biopic Better Man (2024), which takes Robbie Williams’ performing-monkey self-image and makes it literal: the singer is played by a CGI chimp. More surprising still, the approach wrings rich emotion from his simian self-loathing as Williams narrates his turbulent life story.
But even amid this torrent of innovation, Pavements’ particular marriage of form and substance stands out. In creating fully operative satellite versions of the band’s story, Perry demonstrates the innate absurdity of rock biopics, and of a band of Pavement’s bent ever joining the pantheon of Queen, Elton John and co.
Reflecting on the band’s particular balance of authentic feeling and wry self-awareness — the real thing and raised eyebrow — Perry says: “Swallowing a legacy and regurgitating it as a musical, film and museum is the only approach that makes sense.” In pushing the rock doc’s creaky parameters he found his subject’s heart.
‘Pavements’ is in UK cinemas from July 11
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