Fri, May 30 at 7:30pm: Post-screening discussion with Pavement band members Bob Nastanovich and Steve West, moderated by WNXP’s Celia Gregory | BUY TICKETS
Director Alex Ross Perry (LISTEN UP PHILIP, HER SMELL) undergoes a massive undertaking with his new “documentary” about the legendary indie band Pavement. By simultaneously mounting scripted scenes with actors in a fake Oscar-bait biopic, a jukebox musical stage play based on their songs, and a popup exhibition of questionable band ephemera, Perry and collaborator/editor Robert Greene blend it all together with interviews and archival footage — and come out with a wildly kaleidoscopic impression of the beloved indie rock band. Local connections abound as Nashville bands Soccer Mommy and Bully appear in the museum section, and former resident and film/tv composer Keegan DeWitt provides arrangements for the musical.
“Perry’s film, one of his most accomplished and complete-feeling to date, exists in both a past and conditional tense. It gives a brilliant précis of one of indie music’s most influential artists: in its most conventional passages, it’s a visual and critical biography identifying the key features of their suburban and middle-American backgrounds, their initiation into “alt” culture and the art life as students, and their sometimes loving, often tentative rapport with the ‘90s’ big-money music industry. But after establishing this baseline of reality, Perry and his mock-doc-making, fake-it-so-real editor Robert Greene (who seems a larger artistic collaborator here) devise highly inventive fictional segments that aren’t necessarily plausible but have a persuasive, satirical feel a few semitones off-pitch from reality.” —David Katz, The Film Stage “There are meta-movies, and then there’s Alex Ross Perry’s PAVEMENTS… For a heady and hyperliterate group like Pavement, only a multi-pronged metafictional approach could do them justice.” —Marshall Shaffer, The Playlist “Pavement might not have really been the most important band ever, but PAVEMENTS is an important documentary. It’s a reminder that the fourth (and fifth and sixth) wall can be smashed, that the rock doc can be reinvented. And that when the message is meta for meta’s sake, why not make the medium that way, too?” —Adam Solomons, IndieWire
