Alex Ross Perry

That weird Pavement jukebox musical from earlier this month is part of a weird movie directed by Alex Ross Perry, though nobody, especially not the filmmakers, seem able to articulate what that means. According to a new profile in the New Yorker, Pavement’s label Matador Records reached out to Perry three years ago. The band sought a movie, but frontman Stephen Malkmus did not want a documentary. He “wanted to hire a screenwriter. But he didn’t want a screenplay.” According to Perry, “No one knew what that meant.” Perry decided to make something “legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical,” he said. “You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [Ren...