Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
The Latest Apatow Collaboration is Big on Cox
While not a perfect satire like This is Spinal Tap, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is entertaining and usually funny.
What’s up with the biopics? They’re all so whiny and melodramatic. For anyone who’s ever thought that, so have Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow, co-writers (Kasdan was also the director) of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
A Rundown of the Plot
“Just give him a couple minutes, son. Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life,” says Sam (played by Tim Meadows) during the schmaltzy opening minutes. It’s just the first riff on the raff of all those silly little ostentatious bawlers with which the populace has been inundated over the years, the most recently notable being Ray and Walk the Line.
The audience is then escorted away to a childhood memory, where Dewey and his brother have a machete fight. This predictably results in malady, though the type of malady is hardly predictable (“This was a particularly bad case of somebody being cut in half,” says the doctor). Those must’ve been some pretty sharp machetes.
In these scenes, the only ones where Dewey is played by somebody other than John C. Reilly, who passes for as young as 14, the treatment establishes the first leitmotif: the haunting memory Dewey has of – well, performing an amateur hemicorporectomy on his brother; and the aftershock effects this event has on his life. The first effect? Well, besides the eternal hatred of his father (who repeatedly says, “The wrong kid died”), he learns how to play guitar – remarkably fast, too – and plays his first song: “Cut My Brother in Half Blues.”
It doesn’t take long, though, before Dewey starts to hit it big. Married, with an ever-increasing number of children, and a hit single, the fame gets to his head – in what is often a funny fashion. Following Elvis (Jack White) on stage, Dewey needs a glass of water to help him relax but instead discovers marijuana. “Get outta here... you don’t want no part of this,” warns Sam – but he always takes it anyway.
Analysis
Walk Hard is almost too good at what it does – some of the jokes ring hollow, but seem to be passably real. This is an example of comedy imitating art imitating life, and as such it depends more on its reflection in the mirror than its own soul – which is to say that more often than not it indulges its parody at the expense of itself, or a real Dewey Cox.
But for what it is, it stands head-and-shoulders above most in the snide in-joke genre that is parody. Musically speaking, as it is about a musician and songwriter, the film is the rightful heir of This is Spinal Tap; it thankfully does not fake the music (the titular song, “Walk Hard,” is catchy), and the lyrics sound realistic even when they are filled with double entendres and innuendo (“Let’s Duet”).
The best moments are when Dewey goes through his Bob Dylan phase – first the protest Dylan with “Let Me Help You (Little Man),” then the surrealist Dylan circa Blonde on Blonde with “Royal Jelly.” And, later, a dashiki-clad Reilly, by this time a habitual acid user, can’t quite translate his hallucinations to quadraphonic reality in what appears to be a cross-parody between the recording of “A Day in the Life” (the final song on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album) and Brian Wilson’s post-Sgt. Pepper’s breakdown.
In one particularly inspired moment, Dewey, when in India with the Beatles under the watchful eye of the Guru Maharishi, is told by John Lennon (played by Apatow alum Paul Rudd): “When you meditate there’s no limit to what you can…” – he pauses – “imagine.”
Conclusion
Overall, Walk Hard is consistently funny. As a parody, it’s often dead-on. Mixing the elements of the lives of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and others together, the resultant Dewey Cox is a worthy invention. It’s just unfortunate that much of the humor is sophomoric and scatological in nature. Oh, yeah, and there’s a penis in the movie, for no reason – so add gratuity to that charge. Still, it parades no eruditic intentions, and even admits it is “Guilty as Charged.”
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
