NICOLAS JACK DAVIES | GERMANY | 2024 | 127 MIN | ENGLISH
Skinny jeans, tight vintage tees, and unruly seas of hair, as well as a reputation for ferocious live shows and genre-bending records, made At the Drive-In’s lead singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López instant iconoclasts of the ’90s punk/hardcore music scene. Yet the shy, gangly Puerto Rico-born Rodríguez-López reveals that he felt anything but part of a welcoming community growing up as a queer minority in El Paso, Texas, in Nicolas Jack Davies’ intimate portrait of the creative duo. Composed entirely from hundreds of hours of archive footage shot by the guitarist, Davies traces the psychedelic-fueled origin of creative soulmates Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala through their bouts with identity, fame, tragedies, friendship and even Scientology. Taking a page out of the book of Ondi Timoner’s Dig!, this unconventional and raw doc reveals never-before-seen footage of the duo and the trajectory of their most beloved projects, ATDI and The Mars Volta. What begins as a look behind their creative process evolves into an uncompromising, obsessive pursuit for the purest form of artistic expression, even if it gets a little weird.
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