Pavements

Dir. Alex Ross Perry – 2025 – 128m – Valid for Punch Cards

A movie about Pavement the band—among other things—that’s a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid examination of the iconic 90s indie band Pavement.  The film intimately follows the band preparing for their sold-out 2022 reunion tour while simultaneously tracking the preparations for a musical based on their songs, a museum devoted to their history and a big-budget Hollywood biopic inspired by their saga as the most important band of a generation.

The latest film from acclaimed director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip, Her Smell)  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).

“Part spoof and part serious, the film is about mythmaking as much as it is about music. The result is delightfully destabilizing.” – Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times

“Captures the artistry, ingenuity and humor of its subject better than an encyclopedic history ever could – a music doc for whom success, in the spirit of Pavement, looks very different.” – Luke Hicks, Little White Lies