FILTER SCREEN
Uneven pathway
A chimerical film attempts to build a world about a band that built their own.
By Grayson Haver Currin.
Malkmus; ‘Pavement’ (from left) Logan Miller as Mark Ibold, Griffin Newman as Steve West, Nat Wolff as Spiral Stairs, Fred Hechinger as Bob Nastanovich, Joe Keery as Malkmus; Malkmus brightens a corner; Keery on-stage; the fictional Ibold and Malkmus with Matador’s Chris Lombardi (Jason Schwartzman); the real things, 1995.
Mubi
Pavements
★★★
Dir. Alex Ross Perry
MUBI. ST
A LEX ROSS PERRY is not shy about his desire to explode the music-movie-industrial complex. “The music documentary has run out of gas,” he has written. “The musician biopic… [is] the lowest form of highbrow storytelling.” Pavements – a two-hour slipstream where the borders between documentary, biopic and absurdist humour barely appear to exist – is his test case for, as he has also put, finding more creative and compelling ways for the stories of bands to be “told and sold”. At least occasionally, he succeeds.