Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U’ on Disney+, A Road Trip Riff On Her Breakthrough Debut

You won’t need to update your content rating to enjoy Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U – Disney+ bleeps it out whenever the singer-songwriter engages with her charming penchant for F-bombs. But that light editing doesn’t diminish the vigor of this documentary/extended music video/personal meditation on Rodrigo’s eventful first year as a recording artist. So let’s look back with Olivia as Sour vies for Album of the Year honors at this year’s Grammys and she prepares for her first headlining concert tour. 

OLIVIA RODRIGO: DRIVING HOME 2 U: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: On January 19, 2021, Olivia Rodrigo’s debut single did a power slide straight into the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100. “Drivers License” has since garnered Grammy noms for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and Rodrigo herself is the favorite for Best New Artist honors. It’s pretty crazy. Six months after her smash debut, the seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter was visiting the White House and advocating for COVID vaccinations on behalf of President Biden. Driving Home 2 U reflects on that whirlwind trip into the public’s consciousness. Framed as a solo road trip from Salt Lake City, where she wrote and recorded her debut record Sour, back to her home state of California, Driving Home features alternate versions of the album’s biggest songs performed at stops along the way. As Rodrigo muses on her songwriting process, looks back on the emotions that fueled her lyrics, and revisits the studio where it all came together with producer Dan Nigro, she presents herself as a remarkably grounded individual who’s able to enjoy the rush of adulation and stardom while observing it all with a kind of clinical detachment. Her background as a child actor in the Disney universe helped. “Being a child actor, you’re constantly told everything you do is amazing,” Rodrigo says. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re a star.’ And I was always, like, really disillusioned by that from a very young age.” Instead, she started thinking everything she created was total shit. She started being her own biggest critic. And now she has one of the biggest-selling albums of last year.

Each of the performances have their own vibe. “Happier” is staged in a house, where a lamp on the floor and a glitter ball in the corner join unpacked boxes and an Ampeg bass cabinet, Rodrigo and her keyboard in one room and her guitarist and keyboard player opposite, perched on a stack of mattresses, with the rhythm section set up in the living room. “That eternal love bullshit you know you’ll never mean” – the Taylor Swift influence on “Happier” is strong. For “Jealousy, Jealousy,” Rodrigo arrives under a pair of overpasses in her kick-ass, powder-blue, three-on-the-tree 1970 Ford Bronco, where she joins her rocking band already set up. “Deja Vu” is rendered in Tiny Desk Concert form, with her outfit playing little instruments and Rodrigo singing in the shadow of the giant screen at Motor Vu Drive-in Theater in Idaho Falls, Idaho. And “Good 4 U” loses the Paramore-style trappings of the album version, but gains an orchestral string section arranged on a circular platform in California’s Red Rock Canyon State Park.

Driving Home freely engages with how huge Sour has gotten – Rodrigo calls her life since its breakthrough a “whirlwind,” or even “just weird” – but the accolades and album sales don’t make her work sacrosanct. “I think storytelling doesn’t have to come from a place of devastation,” she tells her pal, musician Jacob Collier. “Which is what I’m trying to tell myself for the rest of my career. I’m terrified that because I’m not going to be devastated the rest of my life, that I’m no longer gonna make a good album.” She also understands that having a number one debut will ultimately make the money people and the label people and all the regular people ask one thing: What’s next? For now, she doesn’t have to worry about it. From Portland, Oregon to London, England, all 48 dates of her debut headlining tour are completely sold out.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Filmed promotional tie-ins like Driving Home 2 U have become standard operating procedure for recording artists, assuming the role music videos once played while simultaneously emulating that form and turning it on its ear. A recent highlight in this vein is Kasey Musgraves’ Star-Crossed, with alternate versions of her new album’s material, woozy stoned vibing, and road trip riffs of its own.

Performance Worth Watching: “I think the worst part of being in love is having something to lose…I’m very obsessed and like, weirded out with the idea of all relationships just being so recycled…I’ve grown, like, five years’ worth…in one year!” Barring her producer and a few accompanists, Rodrigo is the only cast member of Driving Home, and her ruminations on love and life become an enjoyable running commentary.

Memorable Dialogue: “I’ve always been so attracted to music like that, that, like, hits these, like, deep parts of the human psyche,” Olvia Rodrigo says early on in Driving Home 2 U. “I think being a songwriter is actually, like, the best job and the best, like, craft. There’s nothing that connects people, and there’s nothing that’s, like, a truer window into human emotion than music.”

Sex and Skin: No way!

Our Take: Driving Home 2 U is certainly a visual pleasure. Director Stacy Lee captures Olivia Rodrigo’s reflective overall mood with nighttime tracking shots of her Ford Bronco rambling its way across hematite landscapes full of sediment towers and sandstone turrets, or the blush of purple dawn drenching a gas station relic or roadside motel that dates from America’s first automobile age. The film stock shifts easily into an approximation of 8mm home movies, befitting the revisiting of memories theme, and as Rodrigo lounges in a motel room in her perfected boho casual look, listening to old demos on her phone, the aesthetic becomes part road movie and part modern-day Apple ad spot. But Driving Home thrives on listening, too, and watching, and especially so in a few of the standout performance sequences. Rodrigo commands the circular, mirrored platform for “Good 4 U,” and the sweeping string arrangement aligns wonderfully with theater-in-the-round camera work and the fossiliferous backdrop of Red Rock Canyon State Park. “Enough for You” finds Rodrigo in a secluded wooded clearing, alone but for her incongruously sparkly electric piano that adds bucketfuls of languorous atmosphere. Best of all might be the performance of “Traitor.” Rodrigo parks at the pumps outside Roy’s Motel and Cafe in Amboy, California, where her Nord Stage 3 is already set up. She sets the keyboard melody running, taps out a rhythm on the body of her acoustic Gibson, loops that, and then switches to a beautifully scuffed Fender Jazzmaster as the song and crisp desert air swirl together. If filmed accompanying material like Driving Home 2 U can do anything for the records they’re promoting, it’s moments like this, full of new inflections and highlights on the artist’s existing work.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Olivia Rodrigo is probably gonna win a zillion Grammys. So why not walk with her through how her debut record came to be, and hear some new takes on her songs in a stylized road trip setting?

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges