Smells like mock spirit

With docufiction ‘Pavements’ suggesting that a cult 1990s indie group are hugely influential, Xan Brooks says all films about fake or real musicians lead back to ‘This Is Spinal Tap’

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“Has there ever been a good movie made about a rock band?” asks Stephen Malkmus in Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s self-questioning, self-critical, unabashedly self-conscious rock music documentary. While Pavements is ostensibly about Pavement, Malkmus’s lo-fi American indie group, it is also - arguably mostly - about the shortfalls and pitfalls of the rockumentary itself. It dismantles the genre, pokes fun at its pomposity, and provides an answer of sorts to Malkmus’s opening question. The best way of making a good movie about a rock band, it suggests, is to make one as deliberately shonky and suspect as possible.

Perry’s film starts as it means to go on, with a caption informing us that Pavement are “the world’s most important and influential band” as opposed to what they were: a 1990s cult act, loved by the few and largely ignored by the rest. Malkmus’s band made hay in the margins and briefly flirted with success before quietly folding at the turn of the century. They had a problematic first drummer who was eventually let go. They caused a minor fracas at Lollapalooza in 1995. They recorded a B-side - “Harness Your Hopes” - that would later go viral on TikTok. In terms of red-blooded drama, that’s pretty much the extent of Pavement’s rock’n’roll saga.

Perry, though, isn’t one to let the facts get in the way of a story. His ambition, he has said, was always to create a “historically inaccurate movie”; one that plays fast and loose with the biographical details and shuffles true-life events with sugar-frosted confections. So Pavements crosscuts the rehearsals for a recent band reunion with archive footage from its Nineties heyday. However, it also weaves in references to a popup Pavement museum and a cheesy jukebox musical (Slanted! Enchanted!), both of which were only developed as part of the movie’s production.