Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird - A Rock-Doc of Brotherly Love, Shot from Inside
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
There’s a strong commercial incentive behind the glut of music documentaries available these days. The films tend to drive streaming on music services such as Spotify and Apple Music in the weeks following a release.
This not only applies to contemporary acts such as Taylor Swift, Billy Eilish and Beyoncé, or acts such as Talking Heads and Wham! (whose recent documentary helped the band achieve its first no. 1 song with Last Christmas, 37 years after the song’s release).
The same effect should similarly boost the profile of the subjects of Nicolas Jack Davies’ Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, the El Paso duo, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (guitar, producer) and Cedric Bixler-Zavala (vocals, lyrics).
Omar and Cedric, brothers in art-rock in The Mars Volta.
Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala are the core members of the progressive hardcore band At the Drive-In, which existed on and off from 1994 to 2018, as well as the eclectic art rock ensemble The Mars Volta (2001-2012, 2018 to the present).
Beyond its promotional function, Omar and Cedric stands on its own as an original behind-the-music documentary. All the actual filming of the band was done by Rodriguez-Lopez, including video footage going back to his childhood. (Omar is also a filmmaker, whose satiric feature, Los Chidos, premiered at SXSW in 2012).
London-based director Nicolas Jack Davies, who has shot Mumford and Sons videos and a concert film on the band, Gorillaz, assembled the film from decades of footage, combined with contemporary voice-over reminiscences of the two musicians in what amounts to a story of brotherly love.
It’s the story of a relationship that started when Omar and Cedric were small Latino kids in El Paso, with brown skin and halos of curly hair, who bonded against bullies and racism and found a creative haven in the hardcore rock scene. (The film underplays their relatively middle-class backgrounds: Omar’s father was a psychiatrist, Cedric’s a professor).
The title comes from an early scene, on the eve of recording At the Drive-In’s breakthrough album, Relationship of Command. We see the pair bickering as they load up the car and get ready to drive to the Malibu studio where they will live and record. After he turned the video camera off, Omar tells us in voice over, that he’d told Cedric: “If this ever gets weird, promise me that we can just stop. This is not more important than loving you.”
Not surprisingly, because this is a rock and roll story, things got weird quickly. We soon see Omar’s immediate frustration with the macho hardcore audiences they attracted with their album. He chides a raucous crowd at an Australian rock festival like an annoyed schoolteacher: “I think it’s a very, very sad day when the only way you can express yourself is through slam-dancing,” Six months later, the band broke up for the first time.
What the film communicates, along with the platonic love story, is how exhausting - morally, mentally and physically - the experience of being in a rock band can be. Everything takes a toll: The band’s frenetic live shows, the emotional swings, the attractions and dangers of drug use, the artistic and personal differences and the deaths of band mates.
In Cedric’s case, there was also the deeply regretted involvement with the Church of Scientology which caused him to part ways with Omar in 2013. (Later, Cedric’s glamorous wife, Chrissie Carnell-Bixler, who brought him into the church, was one of the women who accused That ‘70s Show actor and church follower, Danny Masterson of sexually assaulting her.)
For those unfamiliar with the band there’s a decent chance you’ll find something appealing in the duo’s wide-ranging musical oeuvre. The earliest At The Drive-In music was hardcore punk inspired, involving lots of shuddering rhythms, and the kind of squalling guitar and yowling vocals that brings to mind a sack of cats going through a wood-chipper. But the duo’s musical style changed and expanded and grew easier on the ears.
The latest 2022 album from The Mars Volta, by musicians now well into middle-age, is softer and more eclectic, and the film’s most recent footage of the band in concert shows Cedric with a thicker waist and grey streaked beard. The New York Times’ Jon Pareles wrote of the most recent album: “At various moments, there are hints of Steely Dan, Tame Impala, trap, salsa and The Band.”
You know how it goes with rock and roll: It gets weird, and then it gets old
Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird. Directed by Nicholas Dave Eliot. With Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Available on VOD/digital starting on January 10.