For the past two years, we’ve been anticipating the weird new Pavement movie. In just over a month, it will make its way into the world: Director Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements will premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which runs from August 28 to September 7. It stars Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Zoe Lister-Jones, Michael Esper, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, and Kathryn Gallagher. A press release bills it as “a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid.”

A 2022 New Yorker feature about Pavement’s reunion tour revealed that Perry — whose output includes the ’90s rock narrative Her Smell and music videos for various indie bands, including Pavement’s own 2022 video for the viral B-side “Harness Your Hopes” — was working on an unconventional hybrid documentary/biopic about the band. As the story explained, Pavement and Matador Records approached Perry about the project: “The band wanted a movie, but Stephen Malkmus, the frontman, said he wasn’t interested in hiring a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to hire a screenwriter. But he didn’t want a screenplay. ‘No one knew what that meant,’ Perry said.”

The director responded by attempting to make something “legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical,” comparing his vision to various Bob Dylan movies combined: “You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates, and put them all in a blender.” As the article explained, he operated under this premise: “What if Pavement, the Pynchonian rock group that never had a platinum record, was the most important band of all time?”

Pavements includes elements from the reunion tour, the pop-up museum that was briefly open in New York in 2022, and the Pavement musical Slanted! Enchanted! that Perry staged for three days in December 2022, which included Esper, Lister-Jones, and Gallagher in its cast. According to a press release, the movie tracks “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.”

For those of us who don’t think “Pavement are the most important band” is such an outrageous premise, this is all quite exciting, yes? Somebody get me on a plane to Venice.