Bryn Mawr’s Alex Ross Perry has made a documentary about Pavement, complete with Khyber Pass and Philadelphia Record Exchange footage

Pavement have always been a singular band in every sense of the word. But the title of director Alex Ross Perry’s one-of-a-kind music documentary is plural: Pavements.

That’s partly because the slightly askew, ironic-but-earnest, and Slanted and Enchanted 1990s rock band led by Stephen Malkmus does, as Perry says, “contain multitudes.”

But it’s also a reflection of the extraordinary lengths that the filmmaker, born and raised in Bryn Mawr, went to in creating as many Pavements as he needed, to fully capture the self-reflective nature of the frequently brilliant band that released five acclaimed albums between 1992 and 1999.

Speaking via Zoom from his home in Upstate New York, the director, actor, and New York University graduate recalls his first time hearing “Stereo” from Pavement’s album Brighten the Corners on Philly modern rock station Y100 in 1997.

Pavements, which is playing at the Philadelphia Film Society’s Bourse and will also be screened Sunday at PhilaMOCA, delights in cheekily labeling the group “the world’s most important and influential band.”

Indeed they were, for some. And guided by Perry’s sure, subversive hand, the movie achieves the seemingly impossible task of reinvigorating the stale, predictable music documentary form, which the director says “has run out of gas.”

The six-years-in-the-making project, Perry says, is not only “the most complicated thing I’ve ever done. It’s the most complicated thing anybody’s ever done. Nothing else holds a candle to it.”

Perry, who wrote and directed 2018’s Her Smell, starring Elisabeth Moss as a Courtney Love-like self-destructive rock star, as well as a 2020 mockumentary about Swedish metal band Ghost, isn’t being entirely hyperbolic.

Pavements is a surprisingly sweet, high-wire juggling act that incorporates footage from the band’s 2022 reunion tour and the 1990s, including clips from Old City’s Khyber Pass Pub and an in-store appearance at the Philadelphia Record Exchange. There’s also the 1995 Lollapalooza gig in West Virginia in which Pavement was pelted with mud and guitarist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg mooned the audience.

But the movie about the quintessential indie rock band — edited by Perry’s coproducer Robert Greene — also goes heavy meta with footage from a sung-through musical called Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical that Perry wrote, directed, and staged in New York in 2022.

That’s in addition to a pop-up Pavement museum that gathered artifacts real and fake, presented with Pavement songs sung by Alicia Bognanno of Bully, Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail, Sophie Allison of Soccer Mommy, and Sadie Dupuis of Philly’s Speedy Ortiz, who once fronted the Pavement cover band Babement.

And oh yeah, Pavements also includes the film-within-the-film Range Life, in which Stranger Things star Joe Keery plays Malkmus, and Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker are Matador Records cofounders Chris Lombardi and Gerard Cosloy.

Perry plays himself in making-of footage for the musical and film. Keery takes Malkmus method acting so straight-faced seriously that he considers having the singer’s spirit exorcised from him when the shoot is over.

It’s in Range Life — named for a beloved Pavement song that disses Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots — that Heidecker as Cosloy calls Pavement “the slacker Rolling Stones of the ‘90s.”

That’s a more charitable take than animated MTV doofuses Beavis and Butt-Head, who watched Pavement’s “Rattled By The Rush” video and concluded “It’s like they’re not even trying!”

With all those disparate elements, it’s remarkable that Pavements coheres as a two-hour documentary-ish movie that avoids hagiographic clichés and plays like a loving, light-on-its-feet portrait of the band.

And it’s still more surprising to learn Perry isn’t a mega stan of the band whose lyric, “You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life” from “Shady Lane” seems custom-made for his rock doc deconstruction.

Growing up, Perry saw Green Day and Bouncing Souls at Philly venues like Electric Factory and Trocadero, but never caught Malkmus and Kannberg (who hail from Stockton, Calif.) and bandmates Bob Nastanovich, Steve West, and Mark Ibold, a Lancaster Country native.

At Radnor High School, Perry spent most of his time working for the school’s student-run cable access news channel.

“It was Channel 16,” he recalls. “Even before high school, it was always my dream to work in the studio and have a place to hang out and create things.” As a senior, Perry was director of a weekend news show and also worked on a weekly comedy-variety show. “That was my whole life.”

Perry — whose first repertory film experience was Psycho at the Prince Theatre in Philly, where Pavements screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival last fall — graduated from NYU in 2006, and worked at the Manhattan store Kim’s Video. That experience informs his doc Videoheaven, which will premier at the Rotterdam Film Festival next month.

In 2009, he directed and starred in his first feature, Impolex, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. He caught Pavement’s first reunion the next year.

The director of videos for noise-pop duo Sleigh Bells and pop-rock duo Aly & AJ was approached by Matador about a Pavement movie in 2019.

That year, Perry directed a video starring Sophie Thatcher for Pavement’s “Harness Your Hopes,” a song originally recorded for Brighten The Corners in 1997, which unexpectedly became a Spotify hit and TikTok phenomenon 22 years later.

As the movie gathered steam with the 2022 tour, Perry found editor Greene to be the ideal collaborator.

“My perspective is that I’m culturally fascinated with using what this band represents to deconstruct a decade-spanning narrative about the way music and media and culture were disseminated and analyzed and appreciated during the time I grew up,” said Perry. “I’m using this band and their career as a vessel for that story.”

That’s one kind of Pavement fandom. There are others.

“If you ask fans one person will say, ‘I love it that they don’t take it seriously. It’s all a joke. Malkmus doesn’t care.’ And the next person will say, ‘Malkmus is a perfectionist. Everything they do is a piece of art. And I love the sincerity.’ Two exact opposite answers about the same band.”

Noteworthy fans include ESPN analyst Mina Kimes, who always appears with a self-painted Wowee Zowee album cover in her backdrop. At the Pavement pop-up museum, movie director power couple Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach show up. The latter quips: “If you’re trying to sound cool and smart, you’re going to talk about Pavement.” In Gerwig’s Barbie, a Ken mansplains about Malkmus and Lou Reed.

He worked well with Greene, Perry said, because they are different kinds of fans.

Pavement, per Perry, is Greene’s “No. 1 favorite band of all time. He’s obsessed.”

“So between the two of us there’s a wonderful tension. Because if both people were coming from the perspective of ‘This is my favorite band and I’ve been waiting all my life to make a movie about how great they are’ — that movie probably wouldn’t be any good.”

“Pavements” is screening at Philadelphia Film Society Bourse, 400 Ranstead St., showtimes at filmadelphia.org, and also on June 15 at PhilaMOCA, 531 N. 12th St., PhilaMoca.org.