‘Pavements’ takes lovable liberties with the facts, delivering a ’90s indie-rock band in full

By way of introduction, “Pavements,” director Alex Ross Perry’s experimental hybrid documentary about the ’90s indie-rock paragons Pavement, refers to the group as “The World’s Most Important and Influential Band,” a label that seems intended to embarrass them and their self-effacing lead singer, Stephen Malkmus. Pavement was never U2 or Nirvana. Nothing about them suggests a term as grandiose as “important,” much less stirs the soul like Kurt Cobain, whose nakedly personal lyrics are a far cry from Malkmus’s high-end refrigerator magnet poetry, with its witty wordplay and off-kilter juxtapositions.

And yet, let us whisper this part as quietly as possible: Perry sincerely believes in Pavement’s era-defining greatness. And with “Pavements,” he’s made a film that nobly and triumphantly searches for a way to capture the band’s essence. That doesn’t mean he finds it easily, because the rough edges of this story could never be buffed out into a biopic like “Bohemian Rhapsody” or an hour-long episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.” What Perry has achieved here is perhaps best expressed by the name of Pavement’s 1992 breakthrough album, “Slanted and Enchanted.”

It’s hard to guess how non-fans might find their way through “Pavements,” because even devotees will need to find their footing in this conceptual cat-herding project, which patches together a thumbnail history of the band through several distinct angles at once. In the present day, Perry documents the lead-up to the band’s robust 2022 reunion tour, only the second time they’ve hit the road together since their unceremonious breakup in the year 2000. (Scott Kannberg, Pavement’s second guitarist and vocalist known as “Spiral Stairs,” remembers being so cash-strapped before a 2010 reunion that he was about to take a job as a Seattle bus driver.) Though Malkmus has maintained much of his lean, boyish West Coast cool, even edging toward late middle age, the quintet looks older and wiser, no longer burdened by their uncomfortable relationship with success.

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Pavement burned out like any other rock band, but a conventional rise-and-fall treatment wouldn’t suit them. Folding their history and legacy on top of each other like the layers of a choux pastry, Perry and his editor, the documentary filmmaker Robert Greene, combine the tour footage with three other events, each building a piece of whimsical mythology. First, there’s Pavements 1933-2002, an international exhibition that features artwork, Malkmus’ old notebooks and other ephemera, like a clipped toenail from original drummer Gary Young. Then there’s two staged endeavors, an off-Broadway musical called “Slanted! Enchanted!” and a faux-Hollywood biopic titled “Range Life,” featuring a cast of recognizable young faces, led by “Stranger Things’” Joe Keery as Malkmus. Pavement never quite penetrated the mainstream, but Perry frees himself to imagine the band as a platinum-selling cultural force, even if he has to rewrite their history by hand.

Though “Pavements” doesn’t like to linger in one place very long, it does patch together a rough chronology of the band’s history from its suburban roots in Stockton, Calif., to its primordial iterations at the University of Virginia to the early singles and EPs that led to five full-length albums that spanned the 1990s. Perry and Greene let specific cultural moments speak for themselves: a humbling tour opening for Sonic Youth, Malkmus taking shots at Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in “Range Life,” Beavis and Butt-Head making fun of the video for “Rattled by the Rush” and a miserable afternoon slot at Lollapalooza 1995, when one bored crowd in West Virginia started slinging mud at them.

But “Pavements” does its best to yada-yada through the bullet points and spend as much time as possible spinning fantasies. To that end, the behind-the-scenes clips that Perry offers of his Pavement musical are the most delightful in the movie, just for the counterintuitive thrill of watching theater kids sing and dance through a catalog that would seem to defy their essential earnestness. To hear a low-key, evocative track like 1997’s “Fin” performed by a stage full of pristine vocalists validates Perry’s belief that Malkmus’ songs “can transcend their original form.” You find yourself laughing over a montage of fresh-faced zoomers trying their hand at lyrics like “You can never quarantine the past,” and then you might admit, with equal astonishment, that it actually sounds great.

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By contrast, the movie-within-a-movie, “Range Life,” isn’t a movie at all, but a ruse that turns into an elaborate parody of Method acting. Perry frees himself to explore the process of simply preparing for a role in the abstract, not unlike Greene’s 2016 documentary “Kate Plays Christine,” which followed a real-life actor, Kate Lyn Sheil, as she researched the tragic life of newscaster Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself on air. To play the famously enigmatic Malkmus, Kerry goes to great and often hilariously absurd lengths to pin the man down, including a couple of visits to the Whitney Museum, where Malkmus once worked as a security guard, and on a quest to take a photograph of the singer’s tongue to better capture the mechanics of his “vocal fry.” Gazing at an iPhone shot of the inside of Malkmus’ mouth, Kerry solemnly remarks, “All the work that I’ve been doing comes from this place.”

At a little over two hours long, “Pavements” can feel a little like the band’s notoriously misshapen 1995 opus “Wowee Zowee,” a double album with only three sides. Yet the perfectly imperfect shape of “Pavements” is similarly tailored to those who appreciate the band’s creative unruliness. It also feels like an apt companion to Perry’s last fiction feature, 2018’s “Her Smell,” which strongly alludes to the life of Hole lead singer Courtney Love and pays off a chaotic two-hour drama with a breathtakingly lovely final act.

Hole and Pavement shared that main-stage lineup at Lollapalooza ’95 — Love got to play at night to a more engaged crowd — and between these two films, Perry has told a prismatic story of the “Alternative Nation” decade, when figures as disparate as Love and Malkmus were affecting the same generation. They may not have overlapped comfortably, but Perry picks up on their harmonies. Yet there’s still a vast distance between Love’s raw, arena-friendly confessionals and Malkmus’ jagged phrasing and artful deconstruction. “Pavements” is essential nonsense, preserving the band’s enigmatic allure through the same mix of irony and misdirection. It slips pleasingly through your grasp.