A little ways into Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s documentary about the influential indie-rock band Pavement, lead singer Stephen Malkmus gets the news that the group is to be the subject of a Hollywood biopic. It’s the ultimate mark of approval for a band that struggled with success in its 1990s heyday, wavering between courting larger audiences and actively rebuffing them—a sign that the college-radio darlings have officially become a mainstream legend. There’s just one problem, Malkmus points out: “Has there ever been a good movie about a rock band?”

The good news for Malkmus, as well as the band’s fans, is that Range Life: A Pavement Story, which stars Stranger Things’ Joe Keery as the lanky, cryptic front man, isn’t real—nor is Malkmus’ quote, or the article it appears in. Pavements is, in part, a straightforward account of the band’s rise, dissolution, and rebirth, intercutting the group’s ascent to uneasy fame in the alternative-rock era with its triumphant and untroubled 2022 reunion tour. But it’s also an ingeniously snarky deconstruction of rock hagiography, weaving in scenes and on-set footage from the nonexistent Range Life as well as an off-Broadway musical and a pop-up exhibition of Pavement-related historical artifacts, both positioned squarely astride the line between sincerity and send-up.

This might sound like conceptual overreach—not just, in writers room parlance, a hat on a hat, but several hats on top of those. But the overkill is part of the point too. Pavements, which is playing the festival circuit this fall and is slated for a theatrical release next spring, isn’t about just a group of Gen X icons who risks becoming the very thing it once railed against, recycling past glories for a graying audience of loyal fans. It’s about the overpowering urge to reshape every band’s, and every artist’s, story to fit the same template, and how dully predictable that renders the lives of even the most revolutionary figures.

Coloring outside the lines has its risks, and it often pays to stay within them. On the (fake) set of Range Life, Keery’s eyes gleam as he talks about Bohemian Rhapsody, which won Rami Malek a Best Actor Oscar for his over-the-top portrayal of Queen’s Freddie Mercury. An actor playing the lead in a traditional music biopic has been nominated for an Academy Award the past six years in a row, and Jamie Foxx, Reese Witherspoon, Marion Cotillard, and Renée Zellweger have all, like Malek, won Oscars this century for playing real-life music legends. There’s not much of the “real” Range Life in Pavements, but we do get a peek at one particularly dramatic scene, during which the words For Your Consideration periodically flash on the screen.

The joke, as anyone fluent in the irony-drenched lingo of the indie-rock era can tell you, is that there’s no band less suited to the dramatic framing of the classic biopic than Pavement. The group had its struggles, as any young artists suddenly thrust into the spotlight will, but its story is bereft of torrid affairs and drug-fueled excesses, and its initial breakup was so amicable and low-key that some members weren’t even aware the band was over. The Range Life scene in which the band members argue with their record label over the uncommercial direction of their third album, Wowee Zowee—for, among other reasons, being the perfect length to fill three sides of a double-LP package, with the fourth intentionally left blank—is so low-stakes it plays like an inverted parody of the genre, the catch being that it’s essentially based in fact. (In real life, however, the label’s owners do not much resemble Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker.) The closest Pavements comes to Bohemian Rhapsody’s climactic Live Aid concert is an incident when the band storms offstage at Lollapalooza after being pelted with mud by an unruly crowd. But while Pavements frequently departs from the strictly factual, it’s true to the spirit of the band, whose free-associative lyrics resist and sometimes forcefully repel interpretation. You can’t pretend to pay homage to a groundbreaking artist while defaulting to the kinds of played-out forms they devoted their career to dismantling.

The allure of formula is especially strong when it comes to music, in part because musicians’ lives tend to follow a handful of familiar arcs. You can dress those stories up with snazzy graphics or eye-catching camera angles—or even tell the story entirely in Lego, as Piece by Piece, Morgan Neville’s portrait of the singer and producer Pharrell Williams, does. You can even, as the forthcoming Better Man does, replace your main character, the boy-band heartthrob Robbie Williams, with a CGI chimpanzee, on the grounds that the demands of stardom often made him feel like a performing monkey. But it’s hard to escape the gravitational pull of the tried and true, slipping into the grooves of the movies that have come before. (Just try to watch the trailer for the forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown without quoting Walk Hard.) Pharrell isn’t talking about just plastic blocks when, early in Piece by Piece, he asks his director, “How can we make something new out of something that already exists?”

Piece by Piece may feel like other music documentaries, but at least it doesn’t look like them. Neville makes consistently clever use of his childlike materials, enveloping Snoop Dogg’s minifig in a haze of smoke that, it’s revealed, is periodically refreshed by hangers-on wielding aerosol spray cans. (Neville’s approach, unsurprisingly, frequently overlaps with the winking metahumor of The Lego Movie.) Cognizant that, as a solo artist, Williams is permanently linked to a movie about a cartoon supervillain and his little yellow pals—if you’ve come for a glimpse of Lego Minions, you will not leave disappointed—the movie adopts a fundamentally PG tone, which jibes with some aspects of Williams’ life, like his childhood in the distinctly non-gritty environs of Virginia Beach, better than others (a fortunately brief depiction of the George Floyd protests, Lego-style).

The movie’s cheery visuals dovetail with Williams’ characterization of himself as someone who has always seen the world differently from other people—in part because he experiences synesthesia, a condition that effectively causes him to see sound. But it also places a limit on how deep the film can dig. Before Williams records “Happy,” the movie depicts him at a low point, deserted by his once-unerring instinct for churning out hits. Then, it simply jumps to his “Happy” place, like a speaker who’s unexpectedly gotten the signal to wrap it up. It’s doubtful, at least in this instance, that Neville is skipping over any particularly dark secret, but the whole movie has the feel of a sanitized official history, one where the interviewer knows which areas to steer clear of and obediently obliges.

Music movies aren’t just hamstrung by the appetite for familiar narratives. They’re also hemmed in by the constraints of copyright. You can write an unauthorized biography and even fictionalize a famous person’s life without their consent, but movies about music need songs, and those are often under the control of the subject, or at least an entity with a vested interest in preserving that subject’s marketable image. It’s possible to make a movie about a musician without using any of their music—A.J. Schnack’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son accompanies audio interviews with the film’s late subject with songs by David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen, and John Ridley’s Jimi: All Is by My Side stars André 3000 as a Jimi Hendrix who never plays any of his own songs—but it’s exceedingly rare, and for obvious reasons. Who wants to see a movie about Nirvana without hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? The one consolation of even the most middling of music documentaries is the opportunity to sit in a theater and hear songs you love blasted at peak volume on a topflight sound system.

The people who own those songs, and the other artifacts of a great artist’s life, can be almost pathologically averse to anything that might damage the brand, especially once an artist’s back catalog becomes their most valuable asset. The right movie, whether it’s a documentary or a fictional biopic, can renew listeners’ interest for years to come. (Just ask Elvis.) But the wrong one represents a missed opportunity at best, and a potential commercial catastrophe. Ezra Edelman, who won an Oscar for his magisterial multipart documentary O.J.: Made in America, has spent much of the past five years working on an epic portrait of Prince that, at last cut, sprawled to nine hours long. But as he neared completion of the film, Prince’s estate changed hands, and the family members who now controlled access to Prince’s vast archive moved quickly to obstruct Edelman’s access, and eventually to block the film’s release altogether. According to Sasha Weiss, who wrote an extensive article about the movie for the New York Times Magazine, their objections come down to the fear that the film, which includes an account by one of Prince’s ex-girlfriends of him repeatedly punching her in the face, “will get Prince ‘canceled,’ and devalue the estate’s bottom line.” Although Weiss called the nine-hour cut a “cursed masterpiece,” she concluded that, at this point, there is “no indication that the film will ever come out.”

Elton John: Never Too Late has no such issues, even though it depicts its subject as a long-term cocaine addict who spent his years as the world’s biggest pop star in a haze of self-loathing and anonymous sex. That’s because it’s co-directed by his husband, David Furnish, and drawn with full cooperation from John’s extensive archives. Like Piece by Piece, it’s an official version of its subject’s story, if a substantially darker one. Relying heavily on audio interviews conducted by ghostwriter Alexis Petridis for John’s 2019 autobiography, the movie alternates footage from John’s farewell concerts in 2022 with an account of his rise to fame, the astonishingly productive span from 1969 to 1976 during which he released 11 studio albums and topped the U.S. charts with seven LPs in a row.

As you’d expect from the directors’ all-access pass (Furnish shares credit with documentary veteran R.J. Cutler), Never Too Late, which will be available in December on Disney+, has plenty of vintage goodies to share. I was particularly struck by a vintage clip in which John pulls out Bernie Taupin’s original lyrics to “Tiny Dancer” and describes how the use of a single word, ballerina, told him what kind of music he needed to write. But while John candidly describes his descent into addiction, the point at which, as he puts it, “I didn’t have anything apart from my success and my drugs,” it still feels as if you’re hearing merely the version of the story he wants you to hear, the one that ends with him getting sober, getting married, and becoming a dad. I was reminded of a friend who did an interview with a young pop star and came away thrilled at the scoop he’d secured, an astonishingly frank account of the orgiastic, drug-addled nightmare into which the star had descended after the success of their first album—only to see the same account run in the New York Times a few days later. He thought he’d uncovered a dark secret, but he’d just stumbled onto the promotional strategy for the star’s next album.

Near the end of Pavements, the band’s guitarist Scott Kannberg turns up at the exhibition devoted to the band’s history. Some of the articles on display are legitimate, like Malkmus’ handwritten lyrics sheets; others, like a toenail purportedly harvested from the band’s original drummer after a gig, mock the very idea that staring at an inert object can provide some kind of insight into the mysterious artistic process. Also on display are the outfits originally worn by the band members during that fateful rainy afternoon at Lollapalooza, still spattered with the mud that taught them the price of succeeding on other people’s terms. It’s doubtful the musicians held on to their nondescript T-shirts and shorts for a quarter of a century, and even more so that they never ran them through a washing machine. But the temptation to extract some meaning from these dubiously sourced scraps of the past is so strong that not even someone who lived it firsthand can resist. “I thought it was supposed to be fake,” Kannberg marvels. “It’s all real.”