Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
The UK is now awash in nostalgia around the reformed Oasis. For anyone who has still heard “Wonderwall” enough for one lifetime, an alternative comes with new documentary Pavements. The subject is US indie band Pavement, first active at the same point of the 1990s as the Gallagher brothers, but comically distinct enough for singer Stephen Malkmus to reference the gulf in the film.
Oasis wrote singalongs. Malkmus and co were, by contrast, American oddballs: stubbornly playful, gangly and angular, cut out for cult stardom only. Briefly seen as heirs to Nirvana, they were instead cursed — or blessed — with a deep ambivalence about making it big.
And so, with a stroke of conceptual brilliance, director Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip) makes them big now. At first, the movie seems straightforward. Ahead of a 2022 reunion, the band are filmed in rehearsal, while video snippets tell their origin story in Stockton, California. But then, a caption introduces a parallel dimension.
In fact, we find, the band remain the “most important and influential” in the world. Pavements is thus a record of huge celebratory activity around the new tour. A Hollywood biopic stars Joe Keery (Stranger Things) and Jason Schwartzman. A Manhattan museum show is staged. We even see rehearsals for a jukebox musical, bringing Broadway glitz to the band’s skewed tunes. None of it is real, of course. But then — as Perry shoots excerpts from the biopic, workshops the musical and dresses the museum — it also is.
This will all sound very arch, and there is a sardonic note in here about what musicians themselves see as success. And yet the film is droll but never snotty, richly inventive, and so smartly executed that reality blurs. (Wait: did Malkmus actually appear in Apple’s 1997 Think Different ad campaign?)
Put another way, it captures everything great about the band. By the time of the museum show, filled with fake artefacts, real fans and young groups playing the old songs, the effect is positively touching. For a second, you might even sing along.
★★★★★
On Mubi from July 11
Read the full article here