Indie-rock icons Pavement were always a band that scoffed at rock clichés even as they became reluctant rock stars, appearing on magazine covers, headlining festivals and releasing albums through major labels during the alternative heyday of the 1990s. That stance has continued even as the group, which split in 2000, has reformed for two reunion tours, with the current one selling out multiple nights in North America before moving overseas next year.
Around this latest reunion, the group has embarked on a series of baffling, seemingly tongue-in-cheek projects that include a museum exhibit, a musical and now, according to a new report in the New Yorker, a film directed by Alex Ross Perry, known for the Elisabeth Moss-starring “Her Smell.” Perry is also directing the aforementioned “Slanted! Enchanted!: A Pavement Musical,” which stars Michael Esper (“American Idiot”) and Kathryn Gallagher (Alanis Morrisette’s musical “Jagged Little Pill”).
Details on the film are vague, and apparently are vague even to its director: Ross received a loose directive from Pavement anti-frontman Stephen Malkmus that, according to the article, said he wasn’t interested in hiring a documentary filmmaker but rather a screenwriter, although he didn’t want a screenplay.
“No one knew what that meant,” Ross said, instead offering an analogy based on Bob Dylan films: It will be a combination of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of the singer’s chaotic 1965 British tour, “Don’t Look Back”; Todd Haynes’ impressionistic 2007 biopic, “I’m Not There”; the much-maligned Dylan-directed doc of his 1975 all-star “Rolling Thunder Revue” tour, the four-hour-long “Renaldo and Clara”; and Martin Scorsese’s far more coherent 2019 doc from the same footage called “Rolling Thunder Revue.” Ross said he will “put them all into a blender,” with the results bring “legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché and illogical.”
The description alone is already all of the above. No further details were immediately available, although a rep for the band confirms to PvNew that the New Yorker article “explains what’s going on (sort of?).”
