The “sidewalks” blur the fact and fiction to reinvent the legacy of a group

The Bob Dylan Center brought together some 6,000 articles from the musician’s archives in a Oklahoma museum. Green Day’s album “American idiot” was adapted in a Broadway show. Queen Biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” won four Oscars and was nominated for the best film.

If these artists could sunbathe their inheritance and be part of a wider cultural conversation outside the music, then why not the road, the beloved Indie-Rock group of the 90s which was about to meet for its first concerts since 2010?

It is the spirit of animation behind the “Travements”, the daring documentary of director Alex Ross Perry on the group, which opens on Friday. Perry actually wrote and directed a stage show entitled “Slanted!” Enchanted! A musical from La Chaussée “who played for two nights in Manhattan in 2022. A museum praising” the rumors of the real and imagined reality of the group “appeared in Tribeca this fall, coinciding with the group’s tour of Brooklyn (very real and very successful). And Perry filmed games of a fictitious road biopic – with Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”), Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heideker, among others – then staged a “first” in Brooklyn.

In “Travements”, all of this is interspersed with archive images of history and images of the group of rehearsals and performance of the Reunion tour, sometimes presented in a screen divided to two, three or even four ways. (The plural title is quite literal.) Overall, the effect is about as far from the typical rock documentary as possible.

“I was told:” They don’t want anything traditional “,” said Perry in a video interview last month, adding that the group leader, Stephen Malkmus, sent him a text, “avoid the inherited trap”. Maybe in all capitals. At this stage of the life cycle of the road or any other group, said Perry, the question becomes: what do we do with our history? A documentary, a series, an exhibition, what? “So, for me, has become the real text of the film,” he said.