What SPINAL TAP did to and for the heavy metal documentary, WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY does to and for the musical bio-pic. With a fearless sense of silliness and a savage swipe at the conventions of the genre, it forges a brilliant parody that is relentlessly funny and musically acute.
There is not an idiom nor a trope nor a cliché that writers Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan (who also directed) don’t nail, extrapolating all of them to slyly ridiculous extremes. The flashback that starts the film, the anti-anti-drug messages that make each one not only irresistible, but perfectly timed for the latest crisis in Dewey’s life, the messy romances that end in true love and only occasional bigamy, and the meetings with famous musicians (who endlessly repeat their names and/or band). John C. Reilly is, you’ll pardon the expression, pitch perfect as the not-too-bright music man who overcomes adversity and personal demons while becoming a superstar, a has-been, and then a legend. His doughy face and ever so slightly vacant expression, with or without drugs, offers the right sort of baby-like innocence that is the perfect foil to the trauma of having accidentally sliced his brother in half, the gross selfishness of being on the road as his first wife, the one who dreams of a house made of actual candy, births an endless stream of babies while turning into a harpy, and the extended nudity of the post-orgy sequence. Jenna Fischer as Darlene Madison, the girl singer with the very big cross around her neck is every good woman who has loved the wrong man and tried to change him. Their duet, with its barely double-entendres, frames their suggestively kitschy romance in ways that gut those idioms as well. Dewey suffers through the 50s with a pompadour and Elvis envy, the sixties with psychedelics and need to stand up for midgets, and the 70s with a career stalled and iffy wardrobe choices, all the while stopping the action of his life every time a phrase he utters suggests the title of his next big hit.
Apatow and Kasdan meticulously recreate not just the look of those times, but the cinematic styles as well, and they do it with a sure knowledge of filmmaking and an impatience with those who misuse the homage. This isn’t just a send-up, it’s a meta-send up. Yet the music, while reflecting each of those times, is deadly serious even if the lyrics aren’t. Impeccable performances make the title song into the same sort of anthem it is satirizing, and if the Dylan-phase isn’t quite as toe-tapping, it is just as rigorously produced and performed. Without attention to that particular detail, this wouldn’t have worked nearly so well, even with Reilly’s seriously committed performance that never once succumbs to the trap of irony. The same can’t be said about the brief look at the break-up of the Beatles, courtesy of a few ill-advised comments from Dewey during their communal maharishi phase, though Jack Black’s cameo as Paul works even if it shouldn’t.
WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY makes it impossible to watch a musical bio-pic again and take it quite as seriously as before. And for that I say, thank you, thank you very much.
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