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Walk Hard

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Judd Apatow has had just about the best year anyone could ask for. With Knocked Up, which he wrote and directed, and Superbad, which he produced, he changed the way Hollywood thinks about comedies and launched the careers of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and Michael Cera. (Presumably, he also made millions in the process.) The days of toiling on television in quickly-cancelled shows like Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared are over.

Of course, anyone who explodes like Apatow is bound to have a backlash sometime soon, and before I saw Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, I was expecting it to be the catalyst for one. Instead of another hilarious, foul-but-warm comedy like the earlier two, Walk Hard, which he produced and co-wrote along with director Jake Kasdan, looked to be a simple spoof movie, a subgenre that has given us in recent years (except for the underrated Not Another Teen Movie) atrocities like Date Movie.

And yes, anyone who sees it will be surprised just how different Walk Hard is from the Apatow style we’ve gotten used to. But if anything, that just proves the man’s range. A parody of biopics, particularly Walk the Line, Walk Hard doesn’t come close to the gold standard of spoof movies – that would be Airplane!, obviously – but it breathes life into the genre and is hands-down much better than any of the Scary Movies.

Instead of Ray Charles or Johnny Cash, this time we’re treated to the life story of Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly), a country/rock/folk singer who experiences tragedy at an early age, marries the wrong woman who doesn’t believe in him (Kristen Wiig of SNL), hits the big time, meets the right woman who does believe in him (Jenna Fischer of The Office), develops a drug habit, gets arrested, rebounds, etc.

But while the film obviously borrows its structure, it isn’t simply a series of scenes that have been done in other movies. Like the best spoof movies (again, Airplane!), you don’t have to have seen the movies it’s sending up in order to appreciate the humor. It achieves this by fully investing in its own legend. By the end of the movie, you start to feel as though Dewey Cox actually existed, because of the movie’s steadfast insistence –with more than a few winks, of course – that what you’re watching is a love letter to a legend.

The songs help – the movie features at least a half-dozen of them that, while usually funny, also actually succeed musically. Stuff like “Guilty as Charged” and the title tune I actually wouldn’t mind having on my iPod, and indeed, John C. Reilly is on a multi-city music tour right now playing the film’s soundtrack. Humor-wise, the “Let’s Duet” duet ...