Watch Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman go head-to-head in exclusive clip from ‘Pavements’
“For kids who feel like everything is stupid and bad, they’re your band.” It’s hard to beat the comedian-songwriter’s summary of Pavement’s appeal. Who is Tim Heidecker? The iconic indie-rock band of the 1990s, wildly innovative, catchy and self-destructive, captivated critics, confounded the mainstream record industry and upset the grunge crowd, with a West Virginia moshing gang even going so far as to throw mud at them during a Lollapalooza performance. The attackers were probably thinking of the Beavis and Butt-Head cartoons that went up in flames. speak via one of the few Pavement videos that are suitable for MTV: “Try harder!”
For those of us of a certain age who feel that trying too hard is bad and stupid, Pavement will always be one of the greatest bands of all time. Kurt Cobain may have sung, “Oh, never mind, it’s okay,” but Pavement’s frontman Stephen Malkmus lived It. Kind of. He swears the group really tried hard to succeed; they just had a funny way of doing it. Like, say, never putting what would become their most popular song on any album. It took Spotify, and then TikTok, to turn the B-side of “Harness Your Hopes” into a rare Gen X unity anthem. and Generation Z.
In his new movie Sidewalk, premiering tomorrow at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, Alex Ross Perry (Her scent, listen to Philip) takes a kaleidoscopic approach to capturing the band’s chaotic magic. He was approached by Matador Records, Pavement’s longtime label, to make a film with one condition: It couldn’t be a “cookie cutter.” When considering the offer, Perry says, he thought, “You’re only going to get to make one Pavement movie. This isn’t Scorsese getting to make his fourth and fifth Dylan movies. So why don’t I make every Pavement movie that I, as a fan, want to see—or hate to see.”
Bottom: Roadside, left to right: Mark Ibold, Steve West, Scott Kannberg, Bob Nostanovich, Stephen Malkmus. Head: “Pavement,” from right: Joe Keery, Fred Hechinger, Nat Wolff, Griffin Newman, Logan Miller.Below: Michael Wong. Above: Donald Stahl.
The result is a nonlinear blend of archival music documentary (based on the infamous Lollapalooza show), live footage of rehearsals for the 2022 reunion tour, and three fictional or semi-fictional elements: a Pavement museum show that mixes real and fake memorabilia (no, Steve Jobs did not ask Malkmus to pose for Apple’s “Think Different” commercial); a jarringly sincere jukebox musical starring American idiot, actually set in New York City; and a completely fake “Oscar-worthy biopic” starring Joe Keery like Malkmus, Nat Wolff as co-founder of Pavement Scott Kannberg, And Jason Schwartzman and Heidecker is the Matador boss Chris Lombardi And Who is Gerard Cosloy? (Oh, and…I’m in it too? Just briefly. In a clip from Our 2019 conversation at the 92nd Street Y.)
In this exclusive scene, we get a glimpse of the fictional biopic. Against their will, Pavement has agreed to play the Lollapalooza tour. They haven’t been pelted with mud, but they’re still miserable. Then Lombardi and Cosloy call Malkmus with potentially life-changing news: The band has been invited to play. Saturday Night Live! Malkmus said he did not want to do that.
I have to ask Perry: Did this really happen? “Every musical biography blends history and fiction,” he replies. “If you think the scenes in these movies happened, you’re an idiot. This is a composite scene. We didn’t need to show seven things he turned down, so we just combined them all into the rejection of the biggest thing that was ever offered.” The concept of a SNL Music Night The suggestion came from Lombardi, who told Perry that it was the kind of thing Malkmus will was rejected. “Failure is not getting it in the first place,” Lombardi said. “And failure again is when the band says no.”
