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Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2 Disc Unrated Edition)

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Judd Apatow has been responsible for putting together some of the most genuinely funny comedies of the last few years with The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. He’s also proven fairly good at utilizing fresh comedic talent at a producer, particularly with Seth Rogen’s semi-autobiographical and hilarious Superbad.

Now, through director Jake Kasdan, Apatow has utilized the talents of longtime actor John C Reilly. He now stars in the music biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, now available on DVD in a 2 Disc Unrated Edition.

In the 1950’s, Dewey Cox is a poor farm boy with a knack for playing blues, since his father castigated him as a mistake after Cox accidentally kills his brother while playing together. By the time he’s a teen, Dewey (John C Reilly) is run out of his town after showing his innate gift for playing rock n’ roll at his high school with his 12-year-old bride, Edith (Kristen Wiig).

After he fills in one night for an all-black R&B band at a bar, Cox is immediately rewarded with a record contract and soon skyrockets up the pop charts. However, trouble continues to find Dewey as he succumbs to drugs, temptation, committing bigamy with backup singer Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer), and rock n’roll excess as his career slowly spirals out of control into the 1960’s and 1970’s.

In the midst of clunky (or, particularly in the latter, otherwise downright lazy) comedies of Abrams-Zucker Abrams and Friedberg-Setzer in recent years, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story manages to be one of the sharper and more funny parody films of recent years. However, the film’s desire to play to the crude-comedy-embracing young audience gives it a constantly unwieldy tone.

Some of the bizarre antics are genuinely funny, like Cox’s knack of ripping off sinks when angry and descending into Brian Wilson-inspired madness, as well as Tim Meadows’s character’s constantly tempting non-warning warnings about the doing of various drugs. However, some of it, like the constant running gag of Dewey’s father believing he was “the wrong kid to die” and the way too obviously parodic lyrics in the film’s many songs, misses the mark entirely.

Reilly performs the character’s comedic foibles excellently, giving it the same level of lunatic, lunkheaded likeability found in Will Ferrell and his characters. The rest of the cast also provide