There are many reasons why Walk Hard shouldn’t have worked. There’s something disrespectful and altogether boring about how formulaic the musical biopic genre is. It seems that no matter how supposedly unique these films insist their subject is, they still copy structure from other biopics; or rather, the freely available template. Drugs, check. Ego, check. Wrecked marriage, check. Band break up, check. It’s like you can sum up any musician’s history into a 2-hour drama if you only look for those elements in their life and exaggerate accordingly. If there are none, find another rock star. Like I said, disrespectful.
Now that should be a good enough reason to lampoon this abysmal genre, right? But no, the state of parody films in the past few years—really since Scary Movie had caramel buttsex with its own sequels and produced deformed cousins/children like Date Movie and Epic Movie—it\'s the same thing. The movies have gone way downhill, so far in the gutter that Beezlebub would only touch them with tongs
So how does Walk Hard get away with it? For one, Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan’s script doesn’t fall into the trap of the aforementioned dross by going through the motion of movie-to-movie. Instead it creates this fictional character, Dewey Cox, and presents the film as a biopic would. Rather than just making fun of clichés, Walk Hard employs the tactic of indulging in as many clichés as possible to make itself look more like an “authentic” biopic. Down to the silly castings that often make no sense (Jack Black as Paul McCartney? Yeah).
Indeed, the cleverest gag in the entire film occurs after the end credits (Why don’t more people sit through credits? It’s only right…), when we are treated to a footage of the “real’ Dewey Cox playing his most famous song. Walk Hard is full of such easter eggs where even if it’s not a spoof of something, you understand what they’re trying to get across.
Here’s an example. A particular stereotype I’ve noticed in films is how white people are squares and black people (sometimes subbed with Latinos) are overtly exotic beings and walking bags of lust. We saw this in the new Hairspray, where the black kids danced sensually and that’s supposed to distinguish them from the more proper white kids. In Walk Hard, the patrons of an African-American bar were basically having sex with clothes on, and it’s a very nice jab. Funnier still when Dewey wins the crowd over by relating to them in a song about having to love negroes.
Walk Hard is like the opposite of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. Instead of a single iconic figure (Bob Dylan) inspiring several creative outputs in the film medium, Walk Hard is several legendary musicians amalgamated into one iconic movie character. It’s all about Cox. While many of the jokes fall flat, there’s still a very good reason to keep watching, and that’s John C. Reilly’s fantastic turn as Dewey Cox. He doesn’t just have great comic timing, he’s also impeccable in his singing, able to adapt into different genres. His transformation into a protest song singer/songwriter for midget rights is accompanied by Reilly perfectly imitating Bob Dylan’s singing. The soundtrack alone already makes this film worth seeing, just for the sheer diversity of genres that they’re able to capture really well.
The irony being, of course, that you end up rooting for Dewey Cox, but you only do because you followed his entire career through the filter of a calculated biopic. His last farewell song isn’t meant to be funny—in fact it’s pretty damn poignant, though it’s only supposed to be poignant in the context of the film and not to us. So who’s to say what’s real anymore?
"Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" opens December 21, 2007 and is rated R. Comedy. Directed by Jake Kasdan. Written by Judd Apatow, Jake Kasdan. Starring John C Reilly, Kristen Wiig, Tim Meadows, Jenna Fischer, Raymond J Barry.
