“If this ever gets weird, promise me that we’ll stop. This is not more important than loving you.”

Since the explosive arrival of their seminal 2000 album, At the Drive-In, and the subsequent incarnation of the band, The Mars Volta, Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala have fearlessly refined and reinvented progressive rock. Hailing from El Paso, these two young outsiders seamlessly fused jazz, punk, Latin influences, and experimental sounds, creating something truly electrifying. It wasn’t long before their immense artistic success translated into personal wounds that, following the dissolution of their partnership in 2013, took more than a decade to heal.

Crafted from hundreds of hours of footage shot by Omar over the past 40 years, Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird traces the profound journey of the iconic duo as they navigate success, addiction, tragedy, betrayal, forgiveness, and ultimately, redemption. 

With this documentary, Grammy-nominated music video director Nicolas Jack Davies delivers an exceptional chronicle of one of modern rock’s most celebrated and complicated relationships.

A Command Relationship

Let’s be upfront: as is often the case with documentaries of this nature, if you are unfamiliar with At the Drive-In or The Mars Volta, this documentary won’t offer you much (you have homework to do!). However, it’s not the worst introduction to the band. While the music of the duo of Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala has often been described as aggressive, complex, and atonal, and more than once reduced to pretentious noise (especially by critics detractors of the early 2000s), it certainly leaves no one indifferent.

Regardless, it’s hard not to be impressed, even moved, by the amount of archival footage Nicolas Jack Davies had access to for the “filming” of this film; from the very first seconds, we are notified that from the moment Omar could hold a camera in his hands, he made it a duty to film everything he could. While it’s not uncommon for many of these types of documentaries to use archival footage going back far enough to talk about their subject (for example, Alex Winter’s excellent Zappa, released in 2020), most of the archives come from, at best, the moment when the artist in question becomes popular. The advantage with Omar’s almost manic obsession with filming everything is that we have access to very personal moments of the iconic duo even before the band’s early days, and it becomes captivating at times to see with what intimacy we have access to them. Noteworthy in this regard is a rather touching scene where Omar, disillusioned with having success with a hardcore punk scene that he finds violent and macho and with which he doesn’t identify, stops playing in the middle of a show to go cry backstage while the other members of the band take turns comforting him.

Cleaned Up at the Crematorium

Even if the director had access to this footage and still wanted to make a film about the duo’s history, he could have made a fictional biopic. After all, the story of At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta is not lacking in drama: between the deaths of several members of the band following significant drug problems and the inevitable artistic friction (including a certain amount related to Scientology-related mishaps) after such sudden and explosive success, it’s difficult to maintain a healthy relationship with our entourage.

On this subject, the film was criticized (in some more fanatical music circles) for not taking into account subjects and characters central to the band’s history, but I don’t personally believe that this is a problem in this context. After all, the film is literally called Omar and Cedric, and that’s exactly what we receive. If it is necessary to go through At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta to testify to it, we focus more on the relationship between the two leaders of the group and the enormous respect and love they have for each other. That’s why, if it’s mainly the biggest fans of the band who will find their account in this exceptional testimony, it will still be difficult for those who are not familiar with these prodigies of progressive rock not to be touched, or, at the very least, curious. And for the rest, too bad, you’re not weird enough!

Trailer  

Translation from French to English by François Grondin.