Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

By Matthew Rodgers

Shy of three weeks into the year and the Judd Apatow comedy canon has fired out its first attempt at this year’s Knocked Up, Superbad, 40-Year Old Virgin, and so on and so forth. This time on co-scripting duties, and leaving the lensing to Jake Kasdan, the “nerd herd” attempt to spoof the musical biopic with John C. Reilly as the fictional Dewey Cox, charting his rise from ill-fated farm boy to drug addled rock god with scattershot results.

In his first lead role of any note John C. Reilly does enough to hold this ramshackle collection of set pieces together but it ultimately feels like a Will Ferrell vehicle without the Ron Burgundy masterclass.

There are slightly more hits – the sequence in which Dewey visits a spiritual retreat in India and encounters The Beatles, with an inspired Paul Rudd as Lennon, and Jack Black sporting a knowing Scottish accent as McCartney, is comic gold – than there are misses – the Cox/Cocks double entendres are too obvious and too often – and at a brief 96 minutes the sags in laughs are even more noticeable.

Choosing a niche genre such as the music biopic and parodying Walk The Line and Ray will also make this a difficult sell because of the lack of headlining act but its also where Walk Hard gets the best results. Chicago proved that Reilly can sing, and here he does with toe-tapping effect to belt out the sufficiently catchy songs that permeate the comedy and keep the aforementioned laughter lulls at the back of the mind.

Walk Hard will not reach the top of the charts but should achieve underground notoriety on dvd with its now familiar brand of stupid comedy, its just a shame that the lack of narrative thread makes it feel more like sketch show than movie.