It’s almost as hard to categorize Alex Ross Perry’s latest project as it is to find a word that rhymes with Pavement. Perry’s tribute to “the world’s most important and influential band,” as it wryly describes ’90s iconoclasts Pavement in a new trailer, “appears to be just another music documentary, until it doesn’t,” per its logline. Instead, the film sells itself as “a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid.”
But what does all of that even mean? The film “intimately shows 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 logline continues.
The tour was real, but the other things are not. That didn’t stop Perry from giving the fake biopic—starring Joe Keery as enigmatic frontman Stephen Malkmus—as much airtime as the documentary elements in a fitting send up of the Bohemian Rhapsodys of the world. “I can’t even believe we’re calling him Joe,” Jason Schwartzman, playing real-life record exec Chris Lombardi, says of Keery, who apparently gets a little too lost in his fake performance as Malkmus. “It’s beco*ing like… a thing,” he says later. What else for the band that consistently broke boundaries “did in Lollapalooza,” as determined by one of their own?
Pavements also features real fake performances from Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Kathryn Gallagher, Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Fred Hechinger. The film premieres May 2 at the Film Forum in New York and May 9 in L.A., before opening nationwide June 6.