When Alex Ross Perry decided to make a movie about Pavement , he wanted it to be as unconventional as some of the ’90s slacker band’s lyrics. For the independent director, known for “Listen Up Philip” and “Her Smell,” that meant pushing the boundaries of what a film could achieve.

“Pavements,” premiering on Wednesday in the Horizons section of Venice Film Festival , is a documentary-musical-biopic hybrid that imagines a world where Pavement has achieved Rolling Stones-level success. The film follows the group on its 2022 reunion tour, tracks the progress of Perry’s “Slanted! Enchanted!” musical that also premiered that year, takes the audience inside a pop-up museum dedicated to the band and pitches a tongue-in-cheek biopic starring “Stranger Things” breakout Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus and Nat Wolff as guitarist Scott Kannberg, aka Spiral Stairs. If it seems like that’s a lot for one film, that’s because it is — but Perry tells Variety that was always the plan.

“The concept was, what would you create if you made a Pavement movie? And my answer was, I would make every kind of rock movie,” Perry says over Zoom alongside his editor and producer Robert Greene and Spiral Stairs himself. “That, to me, felt like both a daring artistic experiment and a valid way to deconstruct the band’s legacy into different forms and attempt to reassemble it, aiming for a kind of ecstatic truth.”

Greene adds that the goal was to produce a project that felt like putting on one of Pavement’s five albums, released over a short seven-year period between 1992 and the band’s breakup in 1999.

“The group employs these self-aware references to other bands and musical styles, creating a blend of irony and sincerity,” Greene explains. “When Alex presented the idea, it felt like the perfect fit. We could be both ironic and heartfelt, just like listening to a Pavement album.”

The band was first approached in 2019 by their long-standing label, Matador Records, with the idea of making a film, even before discussions of a full reunion tour began. “We were like, ‘Sure, but we don’t want to be in it,’” Kannberg recalls with a chuckle. (The lyric “You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life” from the band’s 1997 song “Shady Lane” comes to mind.)

Once Perry became involved, the band had been booked for two 2020 reunion shows at Primavera Sound to celebrate its 30th anniversary — but then the pandemic hit, and plans were postponed. However, it was during what Perry describes as the “COVID vacuum” when the magic truly unfolded and he was able to fully develop his unique approach to the film. Pavement also experienced a surge in popularity on TikTok with the “Brighten the Corners” B-side “Harness Your Hopes,” bringing newfound recognition from Gen Z and rekindling love from older listeners. By the time Pavement performed its reunion tour in 2022, the band held a completely different significance in the cultural landscape.

“When we initially discussed this, these guys hadn’t seen each other in 10 years and they were going to do two shows. And by the time we were filming, there were 40 shows booked and undeniably the most significant tangible accomplishment of their career, in a strange way,” Perry says. “Some of these ideas that I came up with in 2020 — what if Pavement had a museum, what if Pavement had a musical — were 75% more likely to happen by the time we made them because Pavement had taken on a very different meaning by 2022.”

One of the most entertaining aspects of the film is the band's biopic, which is presented in a meta fashion as the audience witnesses Keery method-acting as Malkmus and scenes are presented with “for your consideration” pasted over top of them. In addition to Wolff as Spiral Stairs, Fred Hechinger plays all-purpose member Bob Nastanovich, Logan Miller is bassist Mark Ibold and Griffin Newman takes on drummer Steve West.

Perry believed a “treacly, cliché, formulaic, cookie-cutter Pavement biopic was a humorous concept to explore,” and immediately had Keery as Malkmus in mind. Without him involved, Perry says he would have abandoned the concept entirely.

“It simply wouldn’t have been worthwhile because he’s precisely the kind of individual in the real world, in Hollywood, who would be receiving an offer — like when we were working on this, New York Magazine’s website ran fan-casting for a Sublime biopic, and they put Joe in it,” Perry says. “He possesses too much integrity as an actor to take an offer like that seriously, but he has exactly the right amount of creative curiosity to portray that role in quotation marks.”

In fact, Perry says “all these guys are genuinely interested in acting,” revealing that Wolff was “scheduled to be” in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown.”

“Throughout filming, each of them had to step away at some point to audition for the ‘SNL’ movie, which none of them landed,” Perry adds with a chuckle. “It all just seemed fitting.”

While the biopic may be pure satire, the “Slanted! Enchanted!” musical portion of the film is where the sincerity shines through. Perry wrote and directed the jukebox musical — his first experience with musical theater — which debuted off-Broadway in 2022 and starred Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones and Katherine Gallagher. In “Pavements,” viewers are taken behind-the-scenes of Perry’s process adapting the band’s songs into the medium alongside composers Keegan DeWitt and Dabney Morris, breaking down the tunes into such meticulous detail that it’s almost humorous. Despite musical theater seeming almost the opposite of Pavement’s style, the show premiered to great reviews. This didn’t surprise Perry.

“What’s a great musical but great melodies and great lyrics? And those are there,” he says. “You can’t see those as clearly in a concert hall because you’re there for a rock show, but when you separate these elements and put them back together, it’s like, ‘Oh, these are perfect melodies and perfect lyrics.’”

Kannberg, who was at the musical’s premiere with the rest of the band, says seeing his music translated to the stage gave him a new perspective on the songs, even after all these years.

“It had been a while since I listened to Steve’s lyrics, and they really stood out, how great they were, and the musical performances made that happen. So I focused more on that then, ‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’” he says. “It kind of made sense to me that, yeah, there should be a musical of these songs because they’re great songs. It’s like, why not? Why shouldn’t there be a Pavement musical?”

Now, as the film prepares for its premiere at Venice, Pavement is still enjoying the success of its resurgence — “Harness Your Hopes” went viral on TikTok again earlier this year, and the band is playing a headlining set at Chicago’s Riot Fest next month. Oh, and last year, Malkmus was also mentioned in a popular movie called “Barbie,” which is referenced in “Pavements” with a charming scene of the band meeting director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach.

“I would have never in my wildest dreams imagined, ‘We’ll get a Malkmus joke in a billion-dollar Hollywood movie,’” Perry laughs. “Like, I never would have even thought that far, but we got that before we finished, so it really helped us out a lot.”

Reflecting on the whole filmmaking process, Perry says: “We said, what if we made a movie where Pavement were so famous and important to culture that they not only get a documentary about their reunion, but they get a museum, a musical and a biopic? And by the time we finished this project, five days ago, they are that, and they’ve been that for two years. And it’s a joke without a punchline now, because that exactly happened at the same time as us making this movie.”

Perry, Greene, and the band will be present at Venice, with Greene and Kannberg both bringing their teenage daughters (who are huge Pavement fans).

“I mean, it’s pretty surreal. I knew watching it people would enjoy it, and I don’t know the film industry at all,” Kannberg says. “But yeah, I guess when they show the movie in the theater there, I’ll start crying.”

For Perry, premiering at Venice has given him confidence that he achieved his goal of creating a “cinematic film” as opposed to just another rock documentary.

“Your Venices, your Berlins, they showcase films — they don’t screen these self-made, autobiographical, promotional marketing materials,” Perry says. “There’s a lot of stuff in this movie that I’m quite proud of … and getting to play here is like, I don’t think other people making this movie would have gotten it this far in a serious presentation.”

Greene adds that premiering at Venice is “simply a perfect, unexpected fit for this film.”

“Everything about this project began with the thought, ‘I don’t know, who knows if this will work but let’s try it, why not?’ And then it developed into something else,” he explains. “I think going to Venice is just the next step in that journey.”