Full spoilers for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a movie that came out almost two decades ago. If you haven’t seen this movie, you’re probably not a fan of the incredibly niche rock biopic parody genre and don’t mind. Though I’ll give some more examples of that genre throughout.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story(2007) stars John C. Reilly, Chris Parnell, Tim Meadows, Jenna Fischer, Kristen Wiig, Margo Martindale, Raymond J. Barry, Craig Robinson, Nat Faxon, Martin Starr, Jack McBrayer, Harold Ramis, Frankie Muniz, Ed Helms, John Ennis, Jack White, John Michael Higgins, Jonah Hill, John Ennis, Tim Bagley, Jane Lynch, David Krumholtz, Skyler Gisondo, Simon Helberg, Jewel, Patrick Duffy, Ghostface Killah, Lyle Lovett, Eddie Vedder, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Justin Long, and Jason Schwartzman. It was directed by Jake Kasdan and written by Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan.

This is one of those movies where the jokes are so incredibly ridiculous and nonsensical that they will not always be for everyone. But if you think it’s funny, you think it’s really funny. What I appreciated is that each joke serves to extend and lampoon the stereotypical story beats of the genre of musician biopics, from the very first scene. Dewey is hanging out with his brother, the one who’s actually musically talented, and they keep talking about how Dewey has no future plans and the brother has nineteen different ideas of what he’ll do with the long, long life he’ll lead. Cue the montage of two boys doing very dangerous things on the farm, which culminates with their machete battle.
“Pa said never to mess around with his machetes”, Dewey says. Sure enough, the scabbard flies off and Dewey cuts his brother in half, prompting a moving conversation with the top half of his brother’s body, his dad to disown him (“You’re not half the boy that Nate was, you’re not even half the boy that the top half of Nate was after you cut him in half! The wrong kid died!”), the trauma causing him to lose his sense of smell, and Dewey swearing to become the best musician in his brother’s honor. One scene later, John C. Reilly is here, sporting a fresh haircut and surrounded by children as his mother says “Oh, my fourteen year old son, I can’t believe you learned how to play the guitar so good even after losing your sense of smell. And that pretty much sets the tone for everything to come.
From there the story is fairly standard musician biopicry. Dewey runs away from home with his twelve year old girlfriend to start a music career that she continually tells him she doesn’t believe in, they have an unquantifiable amount of children and a monkey and he becomes famous and beloved. His wife leaves him after he falls in love with his backup singer and breaks the law by marrying her, while getting introduced to the dark side of drugs by Sam, his drummer. His mom dies while dancing to one of his songs on the radio, falls out the window and gets her head crushed by a radio, just as his dad considered forgiving him.
He goes to rehab, and changes his music style over the years, meets Elvis and the Beatles. Meeting the Beatles is the best bit and the whole reason we’re here, so we can look at Paul Rudd’s virtuosic performance as John Lennon, which I’ll delve into in a second. And he hits another low point in his life when his band quits and he takes PCP, runs around in his underwear, throws a car, climbs a building and gets arrested.
Eventually he’s inspired by his dead ghost brother, now played by Jonah Hill, to reconnect with his dad and get his life together. His dad is not interested, and reveals he’s been training to machete fight his son, only to accidentally cut himself in half and reconcile with his son in his final moments. Dewey’s only other solace is in his 37 children, 23 of whom were inexplicably with the same woman. They give his life new purpose. At the age of 50, his second wife returns to him and finding happiness returns his sense of smell to him. The movie culminates in his lifetime achievement award performance, where everything in his life comes full circle and he finds peace and pride in his success. Moreso than that, it’s a much better and altogether far more touching movie than Elvis could ever hope to be. You hear that, Baz Luhrmann? Your epic biopic about a real horrible man is a worse movie than a parody about a fake man. Why? Because this movie actually plays some of the songs he’s written (John C. Reilly sings all his songs throughout the eras, and they’re all pretty funny but also good), it features a sympathetic character arc, and it’s actually an interesting story, rather than montaging through hyper-colorful nightmares with a frightening Tom Hanks. Oh, and Dewey dies after his final performance.

Meeting The Beatles
Dewey goes to India to meditate with the Beatles, which devolves into a big argument between the Beatles and a Yellow Submarine style acid trip sequence which is so funny and specifically weird. Paul Rudd plays John Lennon, and mostly argues with Paul McCartney in what I assume is an excellent Liverpool accent. Jack Black plays Paul McCartney despite looking nothing like him and alternates between nine different accents that mostly aren’t Liverpoolian. It’s truly funny. Justin Long plays George Harrison and Jason Schwartzman plays Ringo with a permanently stoned face. It’s a short scene, but you can find the extended version online. I’d insist you should.

Random Thoughts
– This movie works because everyone is doing the most ridiculous thing and it still takes itself 100% seriously from start to finish. I don’t know how that makes it work, but it does. There are plenty of other movies that operate this way that I don’t find funny at all. Two other Paul Rudd movies that are parodies of sorts, one I’ve reviewed and one I haven’t, operate on this same principle: Anchorman and They Came Together. I like Anchorman but I don’t love it, partially because it feels more like it’s weird for the sake of it and based around improv and gags that serve to make the people making it laugh and spawn catchphrases. They Came Together lampoons rom-coms, but none of it feels character based or grounded in the narrative that’s being told, so you can’t anchor yourself on any one performance, just as Ron Burgundy is played slightly too cynical and sexist for the sake of it.
– In this, John C. Reilly brings an innocence and pure sincere core to the character, and the broad strokes of the narrative already exist, which means the writers have a defined figure to base all the chaos around, and are able to write jokes that lean into and serve the story. Maybe I’m rambling. But I was somehow surprised by how incredibly funny this movie was.
– Of course the obvious comparison I could make to this movie, since it probably wouldn’t exist without this, is Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. I loved Weird as well, it’s very funny, but in a very different way from this. The stories are fairly similar because they’re both parodies of biopics, but this movie makes fun of biopics while championing its main character. Weird is Weird Al making fun of Weird Al and his career in a way that pays tribute to everything he’s ever done in his career, by telling a story that is 100% lies and fallacies. Every aspect of that movie is a joke on Al’s behalf. Daniel Radcliffe plays Al despite looking nothing like him, and they dub Al’s own voice over him for the songs. It was released as an exclusive on the Roku Channel. He’s making fun of himself. It’s interesting to me how two music biopic parodies can feel so different purely because one is about a fictional man and one is about a real man.
– Every time Dewey gets upset and his life gets hard, he destroys a bathroom and someone references that a chapter of his life is ending.
– There are, to my knowledge, only two to three Cox puns throughout the movie.
– Throughout the movie, Dewey works with at least three different agents, including one David Krumholtz and two generations of Jewish producers with the surname L’Chaim. Yes, they’re offensive stereotypes and purposefully so, but one cannot overlook how funny and weird Harold Ramis is in his brief time in this.

Favorite Lines
– “Dewey, I’m cut in half pretty bad. In case I don’t make it, you’ll have to be double great.”
– “You think we don’t know what you’re saying when you say ‘Take My Hand’? You know who’s got hands? The Devil!”
– “My customers come in here to dance erotically and they need a clean floor to do that on!”
– “You have failed conclusively! It is over! And there is nothing that you can do here in this room that can turn that around! Nothing you can do that can make up for what you just did to ‘That’s Amore’!”
– “No, Dewey! You don’t want this weed! Get out of here! It doesn’t give you a hangover! It’s not habit-forming! You can’t OD on it! It makes sex even better! It’s the cheapest drug there is! You don’t want it!” (Tim Meadows is a legend.)
– “That reminds me when us, the Beatles, the four Beatles, us,” “From Liverpool,” “Yes, we are from Liverpool!” “We used to play those dark clubs in Hamburg. Do you remember that, Paul?” “Of course I do, I booked them. I’m the leader of the Beatles!”
– “Beatles! Please! Stop fighting here in India!”
– “You slept with me too! And I’ve had confused feelings about that for 10 years now!”
– “I got no sense of having legs, Dewey!”
– “Dewey, I guess I never realized until this moment just how easy it is to accidentally cut someone in half.”
– “I wish I spent more time playing catch with you and less time training my body and mind to kill you in a machete fight.”
– “On the surface, Macbeth is about revenge. But what is the subtext? A power struggle for the Scottish royal family!”
– “Hate to let you down, old friend. I don’t wanna succumb to the temptations.” [Walks outside where the Temptations are singing ‘My Girl’] “Ah! The Temptations!”

Overall Rating: 8/10(Surprisingly great. I learn more and more as I watch movies not to listen to IMDb’s rankings to determine whether something’s good or not, because sometimes people rate a movie terribly even though it’s exactly what it’s meant to be and should be. Or comedy is subjective. Either way.)
Rudd Rating: 10/10(I mean, he’s barely in it, but he captured what a horrible and unlikeable man John Lennon was perfectly while also managing to still look attractive. That is the Paul Rudd way, after all.)

Next time… we dive into the ocean to learn about the octopus!