The soundtrack to Alex Ross Perry’s patchwork, not-quite-biopic Pavements captures, in broad strokes, everything that makes the ’90s (and sporadically reunited) indie-rock band special: the shambling grandeur and casual grace (live recordings and rehearsal tapes), the cryptic humor (dialogue and interview material from the film), the real—if always mediated—sincerity (selections from Perry’s stage musical Slanted! Enchanted!). New initiates might wonder if something so fragmented and elliptical could possibly be definitive, but fragmented—in sound, in language, in emotional register—is ultimately what the band was, conjuring an everyday world of happy accidents and parenthetical mysteries deeply felt yet totally inconclusive. They lived in the margins and made the margins a place of sustained wonder. Still relevant: the line from the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson where they got the title of their 1992 classic, Slanted and Enchanted: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.”