WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY

VIEWING SINGLE ARTICLE

Starring: John C. Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Raymond J. Barry, Margo Martindale, Kristen Wiig, Chip Hormess, Connor Rayburn, Tim Meadows

Distributed by Columbia Pictures

Film was released on Dec, 22nd 2008.

Review by Cal

The musical biopic is big business at the moment with recent features on Ray Charles and Johnny Cash attracting not only the general audiences but Oscars too. And in Hollywood when something’s been a big success, it doesn’t take long until a satirical swipe is taken at the lot of them, and the result from the writer of The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up is Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

Mirroring the childhood of Cash, Walk Hard begins when Dewey Cox at the age of 6, accidentally cuts his gifted older brother in half with a machete. “I’m cut in half pretty bad”, his brother says, before telling the young Dewey with his dying breath he will now have to be twice as brilliant. His father takes the death particularly badly, intoning “the wrong kid died” like a mantra. This, coupled with his disabling loss of the sense of smell, gives young Dewey all the heartache and tragedy necessary for a tortured genius to grow.

There are several friendly punches to the shoulder of serious biopics in Walk Hard, such as the age old problem of making actors look much younger than they really are. John C Reilly first appears as Dewey at 15 years old, and Kristen Wiig as his 12 year old girlfriend and this is a great source of amusement through the early parts of the film. Furthermore, all real-life characters in the film are constantly referred to by their full names in case the audience doesn’t twig that yes, this is Buddy Holly, or yes, this is George Harrison of the Beatles.

The story treads a familiar path as Dewey early struggles with his first band (including accusations of Satanism), his inevitable rise to fame, then drugs, divorce, alienation and ultimately redemption and comeback. The dark moments are for once handled comically, with even Dewey Cox sobbing,” this is a bleak period!” to himself. The addition of Jenna Fischer as Dewey’s backing singer also provides a lot of laughs. He marries her only to be reminded that he’s still married to his childhood sweetheart and the union isn’t legal. “What about if you’re famous?” he replies, incredulous.

There are cameos by the White Stripes’ Jack White as an incoherent Elvis (an inspired choice), Paul Rudd as John Lennon and Jack White as a rather portly Paul McCartney. But it’s Tim Meadows as Cox’s drummer Sam who constantly steals scenes with his dire warnings to Dewey about drugs, before introducing him to every illicit substance known to man.

The pastiches of real people are pretty spot on. As noted, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash are the main basis for the character of Dewey Cox, but other Rock ‘n’ Rollers are also recognisable in him. Interestingly (as a kind of pre-emptive strike, perhaps) Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys is used as a model for the sixties “acid casualty” sequence, and it’s only a matter of time before he gets his own, real, biopic. The music is also pretty convincing, and the title song itself is quite catchy.

Some aspects don’t work quite so well. The whole “Dewey Cox meets the Beatles in India” scene seems forced and contains some very strong language that isn’t in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film. I suppose the absolute murdering of the Liverpuplian accent was probably meant in fun (or maybe they thought it was really spoken like that), but it stands out as being too false and obviously “spoofy” for the film.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is not quite This Is Spinal Tap for the biopic generation (it’s not nearly subtle enough), but it has enough laughs to pass the time.

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