Trippy Pavement Movie ‘Pavements’ Coming to Venice Film Festival

The past couple of years have been a very good time to be a Pavement fan. The Nineties indie rock band emerged from 12 years of hibernation in 2022 for a stellar, worldwide reunion tour that continues to this day. During their downtime, they assembled a fantastically bizarre jukebox musical based on songs from their catalog, and they promoted it with a trippy pop-up Pavement museum.

As plugged-in Pavement fans knew, all of this activity was captured by filmmaker Alex Ross Perry for a movie, Pavements. It’s premiering at the Venice Film Festival, which runs from August 28 to September 7. Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Zoe Lister-Jones, Michael Esper, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, and Kathryn Gallagher all make appearances.

“Pavements, a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid, is an examination of the iconic 90s indie band Pavement,” reads a press release. “The film intimately shows the band preparing for their sold-out 2022 reunion tour while simultaneously tracking the preparations for a musical based on their songs, a museum devoted to their history and a big-budget Hollywood biopic inspired by their saga as the most important band of a generation.”

In other words, don’t expect anything close to a traditional Behind the Music-style documentary. This is going to be a weird one. “The Pavement Hagiography movie is not something the band would have fun participating in, nor I making,” Perry told Rolling Stone in December 2022. “But to conceptualize this notion, and create a movie within a world where Pavement Hagiography is a given was — to reference the staging of the museum and the musical — way of having my cake and inviting thousands of others to eat it.”

Pavement’s 2024 activity up until this point has been nothing more than four South American shows in May, but they’ll return to the stage on September 21 at Riot Fest in Bridgeview, Illinois.