Alex Ross Perry is no stranger to music documentaries, fictionalized or otherwise. The indie darling auteur has had the inverse career of the average director, who usually gets their foot in the feature-filmmaking door through shorts, music videos, and television work. Instead, Perry made five features before he took on his first music video, which came out less than a year before his first music movie, Her Smell, an infernal bender through the vile and vicious lens of (fictional) punk frontwoman Becky Something. Seven years and 11 music videos later, Perry is back with Pavements, a music documentary so imaginatively formless it begs the question, “Huh?”
It’s appropriate that Pavement—the incidentally radical post-punk rockers that flipped indie music upside down in the ’90s and inspired a generation of slacker anti-establishment art—would be the subject of one of the most in-your-face disruptions of filmic structure in recent memory, albeit a pleasant one—a testament to the band’s contagious spirit. Perry brought in his regular editor (and experimental documentarian in his own right) Robert Greene to produce, structure, and edit Pavements. Greene is a master of blending documentary and fiction in his own films, making him the perfect person to understand, clarify, and build upon Perry’s ambitious vision to chronicle the band.
Pavement history is unveiled in the film six ways: a fake, very expensive band biopic oozing with Oscar bait (for which they staged and shot a fake premiere screening); real rehearsals for a 2022 band reunion; fake rehearsals for an ironic Pavement-themed jukebox musical that is the antithesis of the band (which they did hold real auditions for); archival footage of Pavement throughout the years; a semi-real career museum exhibit; and a behind-the-scenes mockumentary of the well-known actors getting into their roles for the fake biopic. The maverick approach leaves the viewer constantly wondering what’s real and what isn’t, while capturing the spirit of the band more effectively than a more easily digestible approach could. This singular film fits in perfectly with the radical trend of the subgenre.
During the 21st century, music documentaries have carried the weight and hope of experimental film on their backs through avant-garde tone, trick, and taste. The subgenre, sans concert films, consistently delivers the most experimental movies each year—the films that most fuck with form, feeling, and cinematic language to dazzling, upsetting, or downright confounding effect. Of the movies getting national attention, distribution, and heavily featured streaming deals, they’re the only ones shaking things up consistently enough to note. Horror films get close, but when it comes to the nationally distributed fare, especially the most widely seen, there’s a proclivity to pose—to recycle techniques that have already changed hands from the avant-garde to the usual, the way The Blair Witch Project did with found footage nearly 20 years after Cannibal Holocaust and nearly 40 years after Shirley Clarke’s The Connection.
However, the most widely distributed music docs, which come nowhere near the box office potential of even mildly received horror films, remain in the hands of smaller players. That doesn’t mean the average music doc is primarily experimental, but it does have the potential for experimental DNA. Docs are the most accessible type of film to make. All you need is a camera, a subject, and an approach. Thus, docs are also among the most malleable films—one of the only genres (relatively) free from the studio executive’s penchant for anti-art pre-production market research and the who-knows-why whims of the wealthy, unless things get ugly with an artist’s estate.
On the spectrum of spectrums, the concept of “experimental film” is about as unwieldy as they come, as impossible to mathematicize as emotion. (Paul Schrader’s cinephilically revered Transcendental Style diagram is about as close as we’ve come.) The range of experimentalism in film extends in all directions, even inward, but all its points have one thing in common: they are distinctly experiential works made to subvert the rules or norms of filmmaking, find new ways of communicating through the medium, and often make us feel strongly enough that we can’t help but think about it long after it’s over.
In popular forms, that looks like Pier Paolo Pasolini, David Lynch, or Andrei Tarkovsky. They upended different elements of cinematic tradition, but they also stuck to traditions they found effective, which represents about 98 percent of the experimental spectrum. The rest of it belongs to the true Blues: the Derek Jarmans, Shirley Clarkes, Nathaniel Dorskys, and Maya Derens that blazed trails never expected to garner mass appeal.
Most of the music docs following this trend aren’t as experimental as Stan Brakhage using moths instead of cameras to shape his celluloid. They’re not Kenneth Anger in provocation, Andy Warhol in duration, or Luis Buñuel in absurdity. But most movies we see in theaters don’t explore the avant-garde in any fashion whatsoever. Conventional wisdom says it’s “too risky” from a financial perspective. But not for documentaries. The soul of documentary filmmaking has always been revolutionary.
Music documentary is one of the only subgenres of film that regularly calls on the tradition of anti-tradition, that both pulls from the rich history of filmic experimentation rarely re-created and creates new cinematic experiments all its own. What other type of film regularly delivers decades-spanning footage depicting various styles, aesthetics, textures, color palettes, technology biases, and aspect ratios? Music is a different language than cinema, and experimentalism is the translator between languages. Or, as Maya Deren would have it, the avant-garde is the only way to accurately portray the most feral cinematic concepts. It’s the most constructive possible approach (because it contains more options than all other approaches combined) in discovering how mixed media can marry in fresh, affecting ways. It’s a tradition in music documentary history, which has carried the avant-garde torch for years.
The past 10 years alone are overflowing with avant-garde music docs: Summer Of Soul, Moonage Daydream, 32 Sounds, The Beatles: Get Back (the Twin Peaks: The Return of music docs), The Sparks Brothers, Meet Me In The Bathroom, The Velvet Underground, Squaring The Circle (The Story Of Hipgnosis), Long Strange Trip, What Happened Miss Simone?, and Amy mark some of the best. The last two were nominated for Oscars in the same year, familiar territory for music docs on the awards circuit.
The past two years have seen nominations for hybrid music-meets-politics docs Soundtrack To A Coup d’Etat and Bobi Wine: The People’s President. Summer Of Soul had already launched The Roots drummer Questlove’s directing career when it won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance. But it took him to new heights when it picked up the Oscar for Best Documentary over a year later. (His follow-up? 2024’s Sly Lives!, a music documentary tracing the legacy of Sly and the Family Stone.) It’s also telling that directors with the most freedom to pick their next project—Todd Haynes, Peter Jackson, and Edgar Wright all being represented above—keep coming back to the music doc pool.
If you push the timeline back, the trend of experimentalism in music docs doesn’t become any less frequent. The first part of the new millennium gave us The Devil And Daniel Johnston, Dig!, Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, No Direction Home, Searching For Sugar Man, and 20 Feet From Stardom, the latter two of which took home the Oscar for Best Documentary in back to back years. Stardom director Morgan Neville had already made a career out of expressive music docs about sonic luminaries like Johnny Cash, Brian Wilson, Iggy Pop, Muddy Waters, and more. Post-Oscar, he’s kept it up, directing docs about Yo-Yo Ma, Keith Richards, Bono, and The Edge. Even his fiction career kicked off with a one-of-a-kind (whether it worked or not): a Pharrell biopic envisioned entirely through Legos.
The 20th century wasn’t any less generous with its offerings: A Poem Is A Naked Person, Buena Vista Social Club, Don’t Look Back, Woodstock, Les Blank, Jonas Mekas, Pink Floyd films, the Maysles, and Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline Of Western Civilization, some of which began to blur the line between concert film and music doc, as so many do now.
Even if concert films have box office potential closer to blockbusters than documentaries, some of them fall closer to the avant-garde than the typical. Where Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour made over $250 million by phoning it in, Beyoncé’s Renaissance obliterated the lines between concert film and experimental music doc, much like Neo Sora’s Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus. Is the latter a concert captured on film? Yes. But as a movie, it doesn’t play like a concert; rather, it’s a meditative final moment on Earth in the intimate presence of an incomparable artist.
Even relatively straightforward music docs—take for instance, Martin Scorsese’s quiet 2019 and 2022 releases Rolling Thunder Revue and Personality Crisis: One Night Only—play with form like it’s the expectation. A couple more in that category, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years and The Go-Go’s, are prime examples of how par for the course form-play is, the former utilizing new archival technologies to color the past and fill out the soundscape beyond 1960s recording capabilities, and the latter slicing through its edit like The Cremator.
There’s a much greater tolerance for the fission of form when it comes to music docs. What we’re open to or willing to consider when we’re watching a story about an artist’s life seems to be much greater than what we’re willing to consider in our own lives. Why do we sell ourselves short? Perhaps there’s something about being in the presence of these artists that organically knocks down the walls we put up.
It’s not uncommon to catch a glimpse of Warhol’s Screen Tests on partial display at major museums around the world. They’re also on YouTube in lower quality for anyone who wants to give them a go. But that’s not the kind of “movie” that typically comes to mind when queueing something up. But it’s different when Todd Haynes makes it accessible as sequences in the flow of The Velvet Underground, just like it’s different (read: justified) when he shrinks the frame to the size of a thumbnail for the lion’s share of the picture.
Alain Gomis’ Rewind & Play, focused on Thelonious Monk, is one of the most memorable recent music documentaries in this category. In the last five years or so, this is the only film I’ve come across that multiplies and adorns its lead with colorful distortion effects and overlaid imagery for minutes on end; the only one that gradually falsifies historical events as they play out, using experimental editing to point out the way Black history has been distorted; the only one that found the courage, imparted by its subject, to sit with dissonant jazz bebop piano for nearly an hour straight. As a result, it’s the only one that places you at the piano next to Monk, to witness him play intimately and, strangely, in a state of conflict.
The film is made up of unseen tapes from a 1969 French state TV segment gone awry, in which the white host and producers treat Monk like a child on a leash, much to his displeasure, which he sends clanking through the ivories. It could be enough to watch and listen once, but Gomis doesn’t just want viewers to remember. He wants this to be impossible to forget. So, he rewinds and plays it again, this time with distortion. Then, he rewinds and plays again, the overarching pace and each new iteration further complicating and strengthening what the audience is taking in and how they’re receiving it. Through this inventive form, Gomis challenges viewers to face the music unflinchingly—to go beyond basic sight and sound to feel, in immersive detail, the atrocity taking place, as if to repeat the film’s central question, “Do you hear?”
Another contemporary example is 2024’s Eno, a doc on renowned music innovator Brian Eno that one can never see the same twice, literally. There are 52 quintillion versions. Gary Hustwit’s documentary is the first of its kind—a feature film that is recomposed automatically for each screening by a proprietary software that changes the runtime, composition, and actual footage of the film, pulling clips from over 30 hours of Eno interviews and 500 hours of Eno’s own footage.
Writer, director, and editor Brett Morgen has recently become the poster child for the maximalist version of this avant-garde approach. His last two, Cobain: Montage Of Heck and Moonage Daydream, are media-mashing mindbenders that make two-and-a-half hours feel like one, if you can manage to hang onto your sense of time. Using sketches, stop-motion animation, visual effects, a bevy of varying archival footage, a circus of sound, and a whirl of an edit, Morgen plunges viewers into a psychedelic journey through the looking glasses of Cobain and Bowie, respectively, that would need to be paused by the minute—at times, the second—to unpack. Yet, it’s through that maelstrom that Morgen provides a new, previously unattainable understanding of these artists.
If passionately pitched on watching a long, fictional mindfuck of a movie, regardless of who’s in it, the average moviegoer would likely balk at the request, as would major studios. The star power doesn’t matter, and the experience isn’t broadly appealing enough. Why is it, then, that when the film is about David Bowie or The Velvet Underground we’re suddenly open to falling down a rabbit hole? Why, all of a sudden, are studios fighting for rights over the experimental?
Max purchased streaming rights for and heavily advertised an exclusive premiere for Moonage Daydream after the film made waves premiering at Cannes earlier that year. Apple TV+ did the same with Haynes’ Velvet Underground doc after a Cannes premiere, adding worldwide distribution rights and bannering it on their homepage when the release came around. Searchlight and Hulu jumped on both of Questlove’s docs, scooping up exclusive deals, one of them at a record price: the highest-selling documentary out of Sundance.
This draw, luring in both audiences and buyers, is at least partial evidence of the sheer power that music holds over us. There’s also something about the proximity to the artist, the opportunity to peek behind the curtain combined with the history witnessed, the idea that what we’re seeing holds some kind of truth. But there’s also an element of trust in music docs—trust in musicians that have already shaped culture to once again blow open the doors of perception, and faith that the subject will be better portrayed through an experimental approach—that we don’t afford other documentaries.
There’s a natural tendency in music documentaries to understand why a film should be experimental without needing to understand the how. If it were not implicit in the subject matter, the unmarketability of the subgenre on a mass scale would’ve rendered music docs extinct. But the subgenre remains cinema’s revolutionary hub—and 2025 has already added two essential new films, Pavements and One To One: John And Yoko, to the canon.
