“Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird” is as dissatisfied and restless as the Bon Jovi project is settled and happy. The title comes from something that Omar Rodríguez-López said to his childhood friend Cedric Bixler-Zavala 24 years ago, right before their band At the Drive-In recorded their breakthrough post-hardcore album Relationship of Command: “If this ever gets weird, promise me we can just stop, as nothing is more important than loving you.”
It did get weird, very quickly. 2000’s Relationship of Command was a surprise hit that got the band a gig on national talk shows and exponentially increased their fanbase, drawing people who had a shallower view of what the music was doing than its creators did. The band was known for its surprising instrumentation and complex wordplay. Neither musician ever considered themselves Limp Bizkit-adjacent, nor were they enthused by proclamations that At the Drive-In was going to be the next Nirvana. They got booed at the Big Day Out music festival in Australia after Bixler-Zavala chastised a crowd for ignoring rules about mosh pit safety and generally acting like lummoxes: “I think it’s a very, very sad day when the only way you can express yourself is through slam-dancing,” he said, also calling them robots and sheep and bleating at them.
The band broke up soon after, then morphed into The Mars Volta, then Antemasque, then belatedly circled around to a second incarnation of At the Drive-In, then a third. There was drug abuse, Scientology, and ongoing philosophical arguments about what their partnership was about, and what their music was trying to do. Long before that, there was the cultural struggle that both men faced, being Latino in a still very racist country (Bixler-Zavala’s mother is Mexican, and Rodríguez-López was born in Puerto Rico). It’s an American story, and a boundaryless one.
Formally, “Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird” is unlike any music documentary I’ve seen. Directed by Nicolas Jack Davies, it’s composed mainly of Omar Rodríguez-López’s own videos, recorded on low-resolution cameras with flip-out monitors and chunky, wafer-shaped grain in the imagery. Editors Gary Forrester and David Atkinson culled hundreds of hours of footage to create the result: two hours of quick-cut yet flowing imagery that could be an approximation of what might feel like to be on your deathbed trying to remember your whole life before the body shuts down. There just isn’t enough time.