I was once asked if there was a genre of movie that I disliked. My initial response was that a true cinephile sees the good in everything – it doesn’t matter if you’re not inclined towards, say, horror or romantic comedy because there will always be something interesting to see, and that while the mode might dictate certain structural choices that don’t appeal it was nevertheless possible for one to find aesthetic pleasure in costume, lighting, editing, sound design or the myriad other elements that make the film. At which point I remembered the Oscar-Bait Biopic, a type of film I despise with every cell in my body.
The Oscar-Bait Biopic is not the same as the Biopic, of which there are many excellent examples – off the top of my head, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln, Alex Cox’s Walker and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. The Oscar-Bait Biopic is another beast entirely, consolidating itself firmly in the 1990s via a combination of Miramax’s aggressive award campaigns and rapid developments in facial prosthetics: don a silly wig or a fake chin and a reasonable facsimile of the subject’s voice and abracadabra – you were in awards contention. Over time these films have grown increasingly mercenary in their instrumentalising of the principal actor’s performance; all other aspects of the film become essentially secondary to the battery of tics and affectations coming from the lead. Once the Oscar is won, the film, its mission accomplished, vaporises painlessly in the public imagination like so many dissolvable sutures. Try to remember Darkest Hour or King Richard and you may recall some vague sense-dream of rubber masks or hyperreal period clothes, or maybe the echo of a strange, semi-realised accent, before the memory vanishes like smoke.
I begin with the Oscar-Bait Biopic because in recent years it has got its claws into the Music Biopic, which was traditionally either stolid melodrama – The Glenn Miller Story, Walk the Line, John Carpenter’s Elvis – or something more formally adventurous like Milos Forman’s Amadeus, a Mozart biopic in which Mozart is the antagonist. In 2018, though, things changed with the release of the long-brewing Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, a film that was met with a combination of lukewarm reviews and outright derision for making the life of Freddy Mercury, one of music’s most complex and contradictory superstars, into a bewigged, betoothed, laborious trudge that looked like an episode of Neighbours and, apparently at the surviving band members’ insistence, removed all the interesting and rough edges of Mercury and the band.
It made nearly a billion dollars, duly won the Oscar, and the Music Biopic was guaranteed business in a way it hadn’t been before. In the seven years since Bohemian Rhapsody’s release, we have had biopics of Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Robbie Williams, Amy Winehouse, Elvis Presley, Priscilla Presley, Leonard Bernstein, Pharrell Williams, David Bowie, Brian Epstein, Billie Holiday, Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen and Weird Al Yankovic. A forthcoming Michael Jackson biopic is reportedly having trouble with its second act – hard to imagine why – and appearing threateningly on the horizon we have the monolithic promise of four separate Beatles biopics to be released on the same day. The popularity of the Music Biopic has accelerated in tandem with the craze for the Jukebox Stage Musical, for which an artist’s songs give the basic structure to a sing-along play. Queen, never a band to pass up a payday, got in on this early too, with 2002’s We Will Rock You following swiftly in the wake of Mamma Mia and setting the template for years to come. Green Day’s American Idiot is currently on its eighth international tour, playing to huge audiences, some of whom weren’t yet born when George W. Bush was in office. This new form of Music Biopic and the Jukebox Stage Musical form a double helix of revenue for already-successful bands in an era of streaming where making a living as a musician is ever more financially difficult. Like the recent decision by rock stars to sell the publishing rights for enormous sums, these media are the characteristic forms of an era in which buying music physically, and thus producing a calculable royalty for the artist, recedes ever more from view. These media are, like so much popular culture now, reliable, boring and safe – there’s nothing here that you won’t know or already be familiar with.
There is, though, a rarer type of Music Biopic, one which, rather than playing the hits, instead allows the spirit and aesthetic of the music to guide its own form. If this form has a progenitor it’s Ken Russell, who after directing well-regarded TV docudramas about Elgar and Delius, made three exceptionally weird pictures, The Music Lovers, Mahler and Lisztomania, in the space of four years. Russell’s films, in which a nominal life story is interspersed with provocative and surreal fantasy sequences are inimitable – in Lisztomania, Wagner is a vampire who constructs a robot Viking – but nevertheless there followed a small canon of biopics in which a remorseless cradle-to-grave or rags-to-riches narrative was secondary to an attempt to formally synthesise the jouissance of the music itself. These include Bob Fosse’s remarkable All That Jazz, which climaxes in a 20-minute death-dream, and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, where Gould is presented as a series of aspects rather than a unified biography. Perhaps unsurprisingly Bob Dylan, a musician who has repeatedly played with different public personae, is well represented here. Dylan has form with his own underseen Renaldo and Clara, a near four-hour meld of fantasy and tour film from his late 1970s era. Later, Larry Charles’ Masked and Anonymous, which stars Dylan himself as ‘Jack Fate’, has fun with symbols and clues that might offer a key to Dylan’s many mythologies. Recently, Martin Scorsese’s film about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour is full of outright fabrication, none of which is signalled directly to the viewer.
Dylan is also the subject of arguably the most celebrated Music Biopic of this type, Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, which, like Girard’s film, fractures its subject into the myriad personae he’s inhabited, each played by a different actor. Haynes has form here: his earlier biopic Velvet Goldmine, a portrait of a David Bowie-like rock star for which Bowie refused the use of his music, eschews a straightforward portrait of the artist in favour of a sprawling epic which begins with Oscar Wilde being delivered to Earth by spaceship. While critically savaged at the time, I’ve always held that the film is one of Haynes’ best, an attempt to capture the texture of the music and performance without fidelity to the truth, skewering an easy nostalgia by exploring how the fabulism of the 1970s tapered away into the commercial musical culture of the 1980s. Similarly, I’m Not There plays up to and parodies the mythology around Dylan, who appears only briefly at the end in archive footage, hidden enigmatically behind his harmonica. Sadly, even someone as mercurial as Dylan isn’t immune from the Oscar-Bait Music Biopic, as the smooth-edged, easily digestible A Complete Unknown proved earlier this year.
For some musicians, selling one’s image to a biopic or stage musical carries unforgivable connotations of selling out. It’s perhaps for this reason that, with a couple of exceptions, Gen X musicians, particularly those who made their name in Alternative music of the kind that accompanied Nirvana’s explosion into the mainstream in the early 1990s, seem resistant to the form. Part of this strikes me as being tied up with that movement’s relationship to sincerity: in order to have a traditional Music Biopic, you need to embody the kind of mainstream narrative of which many of these musicians were publicly wary. Gus Van Sant’s Last Days tells the story of a doomed rock star who looks exactly like Kurt Cobain living in a sprawling house near Seattle and eventually committing suicide. Last Days is an odd, kitschy experience which avoids a clear narrative structure and betrays a guardedness about its relationship to its subject, but nevertheless falls victim to sentimentality. Much of the alternative music of the Gen X era stood on this faultline – to commit to a sincere message was not only to compromise oneself, but to be politically and aesthetically gauche. Music, lyrics and artwork were often deliberately esoteric, ironic and coded. It’s hard to make a Bohemian Rhapsody or Walk the Line when the artist and their work deliberately reject the kind of narrative that characterises the Biopic form. Unlike Dylan or Bowie, whose multiple personae were part of a larger performance, alternative Gen X musicians would often shun the very idea of performance itself as overly commercial or slick.
On this view, Pavement are one of the characteristic bands of the era. Their first album, Slanted and Enchanted, was an instant sensation, and their follow-up, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, seemed positioned to break them globally, but their public image always tended towards one of refusal and insouciance. In interviews, frontman Stephen Malkmus would project a spiky, stoned, ironic persona, often leaving the interviews up to other band members. As with several Alternative rock bands of the era, the sense that Pavement gave was of musicians who wanted success but also wanted to disappear, who felt a profound ambivalence about the requirements of being known, while Malkmus’ smart, funny, often impenetrable lyrics and liner notes were pored over by fans who would try to decipher their meaning. They duly followed Crooked Rain with Wowee Zowee, a wonderfully cranky three-sided double album that ran over an hour and had no discernible singles. Part of what their admirers loved about them – and I include myself here – was that combination of inscrutability and beauty.
So, how do you make a Music Biopic of Pavement? According to Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, you make three at once. Pavements splits its running time between three narrative threads: a documentary about the band’s 2022 reunion, clips from a pretend Oscar-Bait Music Biopic, Range Life, and interviews with its actors, and a third strand following the production of a Jukebox Stage Musical called Slanted! Enchanted! This tripartite structure simultaneously follows the paths that a successful rock band might take in these straitened times to keep the cash coming in, but refuses to settle on a unified sense of the band’s identity, or how much of what we’re seeing is real. It’s not exactly anti-nostalgic: instead, it’s more an attempt to be faithful to the spirit of the band and their ambivalence with fully revealing themselves. A line from the song ‘Fin’ – ‘No more absolutes’ – is repeated throughout Pavements, and it’s as close as the film gets to a mission statement. No single aspect of Pavement presented here is reducible to the true meaning of the band. Instead, the reality is either somewhere in the interstices of these three sections or absent altogether, the film a huge practical joke on the genre. Speaking of an early cut of Pavements Malkmus said “it was, like, not ready for public consumption […] Unless it was a prank. Or maybe it was intentionally bad. It’s that kind of movie. I’m not even sure.” But he would say that.
Pavement have played with this kind of narrative before. The video to their song ‘Painted Soldiers’ depicts guitarist Scott Kannberg, who wrote the song, firing the rest of the band and hiring a new line-up made up from the band Veruca Salt. The other members of Pavement are depicted as outlandishly obnoxious and complacent, the image of musical professionals living off the fat of their royalties and with no regard for the music itself. As well as poking fun at the perennial rumours of inter-band tension, the video casts Pavement as the antithesis of the Gen X musicians that their fans know they are. The sequences in Pavements concerning Range Life have some of that same spikiness. Joe Keery, liberated here from 80s Netflix hell, plays a version of himself trying to method-act Malkmus and finding it hard to get a foothold in the latter’s oblique persona. There are some outright gags here about the self-seriousness of actors, but this section also amounts to an admission of the redundancy of making a straightforward biopic of the band: if you try to apply the standard Oscar-Bait framework, complete with its emotional arcs, to a band like Pavement, you dismantle the thing that is interesting about them in the first place. The completed clips of Range Life shown in the film wouldn’t really work if standing alone, dealing as they do with petty arguments, gigs gone wrong and inter-band tension. They come to life only in conjunction with the adjacent sections. Range Life only functions in this form, as a series of dislocated moments from a film that doesn’t fully exist.
The thread of the film that deals with the Slanted! Enchanted! musical is for me the least successful part of Pavements, if only because it’s replicating an effect already achieved elsewhere in the narrative. I can see why it’s there – a Pavement Jukebox Musical is too good a gag to pass up, and there’s something of the old Pavement snark about the references to American Idiot – but the Range Life material is sufficient to make this point, and does so in a way that’s more in keeping with the band’s image: the straight-faced biopic is where Alternative bands go to die. “There is no castration fear” is the opening line of Wowee Zowee, a sentiment I’ve always taken as reassurance that the commercial success of Crooked Rain hadn’t dulled the band’s sensibility or made them into the kind of careless careerists who would sign off on a Hollywood Biopic. There is still fun to be had with the Slanted! Enchanted! scenes, not least seeing how Malkmus’ famously abstruse lyrics can be crowbarred into musical theatre. But the heart of the film is in the tension between the present and the past, and the fabrication of both, and the Biopic form is a better fit.
Pavements is not a purely ironic endeavour. Sincerity, as much as the band may often disavow it, has always been the grit in their oyster, and the film doesn’t shy away from emotional engagement. The sequences dealing with the band’s reunion, and an associated exhibition of their memorabilia at which contemporary indie bands play Pavement songs, embrace the catharsis that comes via a reckoning with one’s legacy. In one scene, confronted with a wall of old artwork, Kannberg appears to be on the verge of tears, and even the ever-mercurial Malkmus admits to feeling a sense of gratification at the affection people have for the band. This kind of emotional openness is something, you sense, that has come with age. Interspersed throughout Pavements are clips from the 2002 documentary Slow Century, during which the wounds of the band’s initial split are still evident, and everyone concerned is much more guarded. Back then, there was no guarantee the band would ever play together again, and a brief, bad-tempered reunion in 2010 seemed to put paid to things for good. A sense of mortality hangs over Pavements, of time gone by. The band will all be in their 60s in a couple of years, and not everyone has made it. Gary Young, the band’s first drummer, died in 2023. We lost the miraculous David Berman, seen a few times in the film, including a heartwarming scene where he tells a Lollapalooza crowd to go fuck themselves, back in 2019. One of the things that Pavements captures is the moment at which irony finds its limit, at which time one is forced to make peace with the past and the present.
The subtitle of the exhibition seen in the film, ‘A Pavement Museum’, suggests a bringing together of all the stuff that has accumulated around the music. Like the film itself, it’s a vast collage, one that aims at collation rather than narrativisation, but from which nevertheless a pattern, a life, emerges. Considering the recent reunion shows in a 2024 Vanity Fair article, Malkmus reflects that hearing the reunited band likely prompts similar feelings from the audience – “What did my life mean? What does it all mean?”. The music is the thread that links the associated parts, the detritus of a life, its lack of neatness, of redemption. If an Oscar-Bait Biopic instrumentalises the artist as the centre of the world, a Biopic like I’m Not There, or Lisztomania, or Pavements, places the art itself at the centre, as an unchanging object around which its creators and audience transform, age, die, reflect. No more absolutes.