Since December 2022, we have been anticipating a Pavement movie from Alex Ross Perry. It's a real thing, and some people in the world are finally going to get to see it when it premieres at this year's Venice International Film Festival, which runs from August 28 to September 7.
Titled Pavements, the "screwball" movie stars Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman and Kathryn Gallagher. A press release bills the 128-minute film as "a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid" that follows "the preparations for a musical based on [Pavement's] 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."
"It's a musical. It's a museum. It's a movie. It's a mosaic," Perry said of Pavements in an Instagram post. "What if the music documentary can actually be a film? I asked this question in June of 2020 when I began talking about this project. I dunno, it's a weird movie and I've never seen anything like it."
The director added, "This movie is the wild story [of] how we made all 5 of the movies that are this movie. But the stories you hear, you know they never add up…."
In the lead-up to Pavements, Perry has staged a jukebox musical called Slanted! Enchanted! that had two "workshop performances" in New York City and an international museum exhibition that included dubious artifacts like late Pavement drummer Gary Young's toenail clippings, among other things.
See the director's Instagram post announcing the premiere below.