Sidewalk Stories - Pavements review

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman in July 2025.

Music docs and biopics rarely approach their subjects with the same artistry that made them compelling in the first place. Hilariously, Pavements bucks that trend. American filmmaker Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip) has made a film about the ultimate 90s slacker rock band of almost the same name that somehow manages to feel very apropos for a group seemingly impervious to hype, success and their own cooler-than-thou legacy.

Formed in Stockton, California by frontman Stephen Malkmus, Pavement arrived on the alt-rock scene just as Nirvana inadvertently took it mainstream and, for a certain type of music fan (the kind mocked years later by Greta Gerwig in her weirdly retrograde Barbie), the band's failure to similarly break through epitomised a virtuous refusal to sell out. Pavement, though, are too self-aware to mythologise this as part of some grand masterplan. Instead, as they head out on a reunion tour after imploding with a shrug of indifference more than two decades earlier, they leave it to Perry to start spinning fantasies about what it all means, blurring the line between documentary and mockumentary to skewer the whole notion that straight music docs and biopics offer anything other than half-truths in their desire to shape everything into a neat, sellable package. 

Perry has form in this respect. 2018’s criminally under-seen Her Smell, starring Elisabeth Moss, drew on the histories of various female-fronted grunge-era bands (most notably Hole, Veruca Salt and Nymphs) to present a jaundiced, fictionalised portrait of the clash between art and commerce in the 90s music scene. With Pavements, he starts layering in obfuscations from the off, capturing the essence of the band by documenting not just the very real reunion tour, but also the opening of a museum exhibit filled with Pavement ephemera of dubious provenance, as well as the making of both an off-Broadway show inspired by the band’s music and an impending biopic—named for their 1994 single Range Life—starring a slew of Hollywood up-and-comers, among them Stranger Things star Joe Keery as Malkmus. 

The last of these is the most blatant ruse within the movie, becoming more of a piss-take of the film industry and its cynical hunt for awards bait. But while it’s fun to watch Keery—who looks like a more glamorous Malkmus—deadpan his way through multiple scenes of method acting madness, Perry also makes sly use of split screens to juxtapose archival footage of the flashpoint moments in the band's career with their dramatised equivalents, reinforcing the often corny manipulation at work in any movie about artistic endeavour. 

The end result is pleasingly slippery and allows this most enigmatic of bands to come through it all with their integrity, inevitably, intact.