Pavements Trailer: Alex Ross Perry’s Ambitious Hybrid Feature Pays Tribute to an Iconic Indie Band

Six years since his last solo directing feature, Her Smell, Alex Ross Perry returned to the world of rock in a very different way with Pavements. A tribute to Stephen Malkmus’ group, the film jumps between band documentary, biopic (and the making of the biopic), Broadway-musical creation, museum exhibition, and more to try containing the genius of this influential group. After its fall festival premiere, Utopia will give it a release this year, beginning on May 2, and they’ve now released the first trailer after we got a fun teaser at the film within the film. Along with Pavement members, the film also features Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus, alongside Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Nat Wolff, and more.

Here’s the synopsis: “Pavements is a movie about Pavement the band—among other things. The latest film from acclaimed director Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell) is a documentary that may or may not be entirely true, may or may not be totally sincere, and may or may not be more about the idea of the band—or any band—than a history of the short-lived, passionately loved, commercially marginal Nineties American alternative group Pavement. This unconventional film about a highly unconventional band incorporates a stage musical, rock biopic, gallery exhibition, archival footage, and contemporary observational footage to create a film as irreducible, uncharacterizable, and entertaining as the band and its music. Anchored by Pavement’s slacker-sage-sphinx, Stephen Malkmus, the film features performances by Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Kathryn Gallagher, Michael Esper and Zoe Lister-Jones, and editing by nonfiction innovator Robert Greene (Procession).”

David Katz said in his review, “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.”

See the trailer below.