Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird is a sprawling rockumentary unlike any other
ABC News, Australia/August 20, 2024
By Al Newstead
Break-ups, drug abuse, success, death, Scientology and ferociously complex prog-salsa music that shared pop culture airspace with 50 Cent and Coldplay: the careers of Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala have had it all.
Childhood friends from El Paso, Texas, who became artistic soulmates, the pair reached international renown as part of acclaimed rock bands At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta. But their creativity has also sprawled out to multiple projects and, in the case of Rodríguez-López, nearly 50 solo albums.
Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, a 2023 documentary showing at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival, attempts to untangle the duo's knotty life story, closely examining the near-symbiotic relationship between two outsiders that truly match each other's freak.
Director Nicolas Jack Davies assembled the film from thousands of hours of archival footage spanning almost 40 years, shot almost entirely by Rodríguez-López himself, who had aspirations to be a filmmaker before he picked up the guitar.
Reminiscent of Brett Morgen's cinematic portrait of David Bowie in Moonage Daydream, the result is a psychedelic collage that tumbles through Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala's lives at varying speeds but with a consistently firsthand intimacy.
In Omar and Cedric, we're taken backstage, into the studio, on the road, and everywhere in between. The film offers hardcore fans unprecedented access, but for the uninitiated, it's a riveting tale of seemingly inexhaustible drama.
This is partly a migrant story. The Puerto Rican Rodríguez-López and Mexican American Bixler-Zavala share their experiences with racism and class, growing up Latino in white America.
The film is also about brotherhood. We learn how Bixler-Zavala shielded Rodríguez-López from bullies and welcomed him into El Paso's hardcore scene, where the pair developed a deep bond, and an equally voracious appetite for recreational drug use.
It's also a movie about making uncompromising art.
Much like the exhaustive amount of music made by its twin subjects, the doco goes to a lot of strange and dark places.
An unusual relationship
"Do you tell the story of multiple bands? Or do you tell the story of two people that connect them all together?"
That's the question Davies posed to himself when taking on the project.
For him, Omar and Cedric is, fundamentally, a bromance.
"It's a love story about two men who really f**king love each other," he explains.
"They've got some things right and some wrong. But their commitment to each other? Staying together requires a lot of give and take. And they've done it through the prism of music."
The original working title was simply: Relationship.
"But it doesn't roll off the tongue," chuckles Davies, who got his start working in TV, including British music institution Top of the Pops.
His filmography includes music videos and concert films for Take That, Gorillaz, Trojan Records and Mumford & Sons (which earned him a Grammy nomination). But it's safe to say that Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala are not your typical artists, and Davies wanted to honour that.
"They were so desperate not to make a rock doco by numbers. I was desperate to make a film that was, creatively, not regular," says Davies.
Davies travelled to Puerto Rico and stayed with Rodríguez-López and his family, "hanging out" and playing chess, feasting, talking politics; basically doing everything besides the documentary.
Upon returning to London, Davies was given access to a hard drive, the first in a treasure trove of Rodríguez-López's visual material.
The "love story" became the organising principle to sort through the exhaustive goldmine of footage.
'The weirdos f**king won'
The doco begins with the sequence that gives the film its title, with Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala making a vow to each other: "If this ever gets weird, promise me that we can just stop. This is not more important than loving you."
Spoiler alert: Things do get weird, several times over.
We witness the pair's profile escalate rapidly with the release of Relationship of Command, the 2000 "post-hardcore" album that made At the Drive-In one of the most buzzed-about bands on the planet.
At The Drive-In in 2001. The band were renowned for their incendiary stage presence but resented being lumped into the "misogynistic, homophobic" nu-metal genre. (Getty Images: Matthias Clamer/Corbis)
Hyped as the next Nirvana, the Texan five-piece resented their popularity attracting the same kind of aggressive, knuckle-dragging rock-jocks that plagued Kurt Cobain.
On a notorious Australian tour in 2001, Bixler-Zavala berated crowds at the Big Day Out festival about unsafe behaviour. He called them "robots" and "sheep", bleating at the audience before storming off stage after just three songs.
At the Drive-In imploded just two months later.
The group was dismantled only for Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala to morph their dub rock side project De Facto into The Mars Volta.
Fashioning their own doctrine — "honour our roots, honour our dead" – the band crafted a labyrinthine witches' brew of salsa, psychedelic rock, samba, punk and experimental jazz fronted by Bixler-Zavala, who combined confounding lyrics with a demented, high-wire vocal register.
They became unlikely Grammy winners and their fearsomely dense concept albums rubbed shoulders in the US charts with Alicia Keys, Green Day and Jennifer Lopez.
Servicing the fans or a mainstream audience?
The Mars Volta fanbase are an intense lot: They pore over clues and conjure up wild narrative theories (often with some chemical enthusiasm) over the album's deeper meanings, compile bootleg recordings and debate the group's various iterations over the years.
Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Get Weird is obviously essential viewing for the duo's most dedicated followers, but it doesn't pander to them.
"One of the things that appealed was [Rodríguez-López] didn't want to do a fan-driven encyclopedic history of the band. It needs to be watchable for someone that isn't just a big fan," says Davies.
That explains why entire album eras and some of The Mars Volta's well-worn myths – such as an evil spirit cursing their 2008 heavy opus The Bedlam In Goliath – didn't make the cut.
"[But] there's actually quite a lot of Easter eggs [for fans] in there," Davies says.
For a pair best known for crafting challenging, opaque records, this is the most candid Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala have ever been.
"They've always been hidden behind a cloak of mystique, a mystique they've actively tried to keep, too," says Davies.
Without giving away too much, the doco offers bombshells about a surprise romance between Rodríguez-López and a bandmate, as well as uncomfortable truths regarding the tragic deaths of close friends and collaborators Jeremy Michael Ward and Isaiah "Ikey" Owens.
"This is [Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala], sort of naked… they're not afraid to be vulnerable," says Davies.
"Because we're all a bit f**ked up and make mistakes, we all do wrong things and wish we'd done things better.
"And they get that. They know there's power in just being honest, and I think that is a privilege to work with people like that."
Davies had shot talking heads interviews of the pair but ditched them, opting for the duo to narrate the film.
"It's only the two of them talking. If you heard from anyone else, you'd have to hear from everyone. And then we'd still be watching it now," he says.
"So it was, 'Let's just make it subjective.' It's just their life to their eyes. I'm never pretending it's not just Omar and Cedric's version."
That perspective means some details are left out of frame or downplayed. At one point, Rodríguez-López dismisses The Mars Volta's many key members as merely "hired musicians".
"They were well-paid, Cedric and I carried all the risk of the band," he said.
Clashing with Scientology
Whatever gaps the film presents it makes up for by shedding light on the darkest part of The Mars Volta: Bixer-Zavala's joining the Church of Scientology, which ultimately alienated those dearest to him.
It's what drove the band's break-up in 2013, stunning both fans and Rodríguez-López, who learnt the news on Twitter. He described it as a cruel betrayal but "I just chose to love him".
In order to rescue his "lifelong best friend", Rodríguez-López agreed to begin initiating himself into Scientology and for three weeks, was allegedly "pumped full of vitamins and pills … indoctrination, conditioning".
After a tearful reconciliation with his estranged friend, Bixler-Zavala decided to withdraw from the church.
"All those f**king venomous whispers in my ear just disappeared. [It] haunts me every f**king day. It's the shittiest thing I've ever been a part of," he said.
Davies says Bixler-Zavala leaving Scientology got "so much darker than we were able to tell… [But] if we put that in the film we'd still be in some sort of trouble [and] litigation. That's disappointing because [Omar and Cedric] want to be honest".
Bixler-Zavala was introduced to the Church of Scientology in 2009 by his wife, Chrissie Carnell Bixler. In 2017, she was one of four women who accused Danny Masterson — her former boyfriend, co-star of US sitcom That '70s Show and a Scientologist – of raping them in the early 00s.
After years of court proceedings, Masterson was convcited on two rape charges and sentenced to 30 years to life in prison in late 2023.
The timeline is complex but the whole ordeal brought Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala together, and they eventually reunited as The Mars Volta and released a self-titled album in 2022 – their first music together in a decade.
"Those things that are most hurtful and scariest for you are actually the ones that hold the greatest treasure," said the reunited Mars Volta in 2022. (Supplied: Clemente Ruiz)
A big takeaway from the doco is how difficult it can be to stay together for a long period of time in any relationship. You have to work at it.
"They're just two humans who absolutely love each other but prove it's very hard to stay together through life. It's very hard to grow together with anybody – your family, friends, your children," says Davies.
"I've got that wrong in my life … I wanted to make it a film about that, too."
It's a unique cinematic portrait of a special relationship that ultimately triumphed over all manner of weirdness and turmoil.
"I can't stress how valuable my friendship is with Omar. He is the person who can finish my sentence, in art, in spirituality, in life in general," Bixler-Zavala said in the doco's climax.
"He's the world to me, the air that I breathe."
It sure sounds like a love story, doesn't it?
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