Metacritic reviews

Perry’s film, one of his most accomplished and complete-feeling to date, exists in both a past and conditional tense. It gives a brilliant précis of one of indie music’s most influential artists: in its most conventional passages, it’s a visual and critical biography identifying the key features of their suburban and middle-American backgrounds, their initiation into “alt” culture and the art life as students, and their sometimes loving, often tentative rapport with the 90s’ big-money music industry.

At once a documentary about the band and its recent live reunion, and a fictional embroidery around its status (and missed opportunities), Pavements is a joyous, slyly subversive celebration that, while unlikely to persuade newcomers to the music, nevertheless catches the band’s wayward spirit, as well as the downright ordinariness that came as an alternative to the bloated rock band ethos.

Pavements is an important documentary. It’s a reminder that the fourth (and fifth and sixth) wall can be smashed, that the rock doc can be reinvented. And that when the message is meta for meta’s sake, why not make the medium that way, too?

There are meta-movies, and then there’s Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements.

It’s impossible not to be won over by the director’s efforts, which come to include at least four separate modes of production.

Blending fact and fiction in intriguing and unexpected ways, the film is consistently entertaining and can be enjoyed whether you’re a longtime fan of the band or a total newcomer.

It’s terrifically strange and entertaining even if you (like me) have never really been a fan — and you’ll get a lightly satirical skewering of the whole musician biopic genre, to boot.

It all threatens to resemble a hat on a hat, possibly worn by a snake eating its own tail. Yet Perry isn’t really going for a trippy hall-of-mirrors approach, even when he cuts together multiple performances of songs so that Pavements past, present, and fake-ass trade verses on their catalog of ’90s non-hits.

[Perry's] approach is one of a consummate enthusiast and completist, and he does manage to convey that dedicated fan energy on screen. But he doesn’t necessarily make it feel contagious enough.

Alex Ross Perry’s Cubist portrait finds a fitting balance between reverence and mischievousness.