A spoof of every music film from The Doors to Walk The Line, producer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Anchorman) brings us the story of Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly), a struggling blues musician who makes it big, has troubles with the missus, ignores his kids, goes on a spiritual journey with the Beatles, and does all the stuff that guitar-strumming heroes usually do. The star-studded comedy features Jack White (The White Stripes) as Elvis Presley, Jason Schwartzman as Ringo Starr and Paul Rudd as John Lennon.
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Turns out your worst fears (by which your correspondent means, his own worst fears) were unfounded: this movie actually does have more than two jokes. While those two jokes – “‘Cox’ sounds like ‘cocks’, doesn’t it?” and “Walk the Line was overrated and pompous, wasn’t it?” – get their fair share of play, Walk Hard is, in fact, more than just a Hot Shots! to Walk the Line’s Top Gun.
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This burlesque of biopic clichés flounders from one setup to the next without the engine that drives the genre: a strong central character.
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Strums the genre for considerable laughs, with John C. Reilly playing the title balladeer from teen to senior citizen, generating enough goodwill to offset the flat sections and a decidedly juvenile streak.
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Hollywood's comedy king Judd Apatow has sadly brought his B-game to this moderate spoof.
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This kind of parody is hard to sustain for an hour and a half, and "Walk Hard" does gets wearying at times. But the humor is so outrageous, the original music so much fun and Reilly so good - both while hamming it up in the role and in singing the songs - that it's irresistible.
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Walk Hard also benefits from being written for the exceptional John C. Reilly, one of the few serious dramatic actors who has a true gift for comedy. And he can sing, too, 15 monumental spoofs, as clever as they are melodic, that cover the musical waterfront from rockabilly to punk and include one last riff after the final credits roll.
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John C Reilly just about holds together a funny but patchy comedy that puts a ten-megaton bomb under the cliched rock biopic – and never detonates it.
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There’s a certain emotion, thanks largely to the humanity of Reilly, one of our best supporting actors graduating to star status, finally bound for glory.
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