Premiering to both confusion and delight at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, PAVEMENTS is not a straightforward rock doc, nor is it a biopic in any traditional sense.
Instead, Alex Ross Perry — the uncompromising filmmaker behind Her Smell and Listen Up Philip — delivers a sly, shape-shifting portrait of the ’90s indie rock band Pavement, one that gleefully warps the boundaries between truth, tribute, and total fabrication.
MUBI, the global distributor and streaming platform, will premiere Alex Ross Perry’s genre-blurring docu-fiction Pavements exclusively on 11 July 2025 in North America, the UK, Ireland, Germany, and France. Produced and edited by Robert Greene (Procession), the film reimagines the story of ’90s indie rock band Pavement through a playful mix of documentary, musical, and mock-biopic forms.
Less a documentary than a meta-fictional mixtape, PAVEMENTS stitches together archival footage, mockumentary interludes, a knowingly hammy Hollywood-style biopic, and even a surreal stage musical based on Pavement’s songs. The result is something entirely unique: a kaleidoscopic exploration of fandom, legacy, and the way we mythologize music in the internet age.
As the band prepares for their much-hyped 2022 reunion tour, the film follows not just the real-life members — Stephen Malkmus, Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, Bob Nastanovich, Mark Ibold, and Steve West — but a parallel narrative involving the creation of a Pavement jukebox musical, a fictional museum dedicated to the band’s legacy, and a hilariously overwrought biopic starring Joe Keery as Malkmus. Joining Keery are a cast of indie and alt-comedy stalwarts — Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Kathryn Gallagher, Zoe Lister-Jones — who elevate the film’s self-aware tone without ever reducing it to parody.
If all this sounds unwieldy, that’s part of the point. With Perry’s arch direction and the formal ingenuity of editor Robert Greene (Procession), PAVEMENTS becomes a meditation on the slipperiness of truth in pop culture. It’s a send-up of the “serious artist biopic” and a celebration of indie rock’s stubborn refusal to be mythologized on anyone’s terms but its own.
At its heart, PAVEMENTS is both a deeply funny and weirdly moving film — one that treats its subject with affection, irony, and above all, curiosity. It’s a rare music movie that’s not about setting the record straight, but about how the record gets warped, sampled, and reissued across time, memory, and media.
Pavements had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and previews at CPH:DOX, Rotterdam International Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival.
