Walk Hard , the Best (Fake) Music Biopic Ever, Is Finally on Netflix
When film historians talk about the meteoric rise of Judd Apatow’s comedy empire in the mid-'00s, they’ll inevitably cite the same few films: Anchorman. The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Knocked Up. Superbad. Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Maybe even Pineapple Express.
And because Hollywood likes to bury its commercial failures, most people will skip over what is, by far, the best movie Apatow produced in that era: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
Today, Walk Hard has its passionate defenders—ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer wrote a tribute for the movie’s 10th anniversary just last month—but it’s still a criminally under-seen and under-appreciated comedy. Walk Hard's arrival on Netflix today is the perfect excuse to get all your friends together to watch it. Or re-watch it. Or re-re-watch it! Don’t worry, it only gets funnier with repetition.
Walk Hard stars John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox, a musician whose career winds through decades of music history, in a barbed but affectionate parody of awards-baiting biopics like Ray and Walk the Line. Beginning in the mid-1940s and continuing into the present, Dewey Cox goes on a Forrest Gumpian tour that includes fateful encounters with musicians like Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles—all played by stars (whose identities I won't spoil) doing purposefully, hilariously awful impersonations.
But as fun as it is to watch all these actors goof around, the star of the show is Reilly, whose Dewey Cox is a fully realized character—an even better performance than the one that earned him an Academy Award nomination five years earlier. Drawing on the full range of Reilly’s talents as both an actor and a musician, Dewey Cox is dopey, sympathetic, obnoxious, and charismatic—particularly when he’s on the stage performing one of the movie’s many original songs.
And damn, are those songs great. Musical parody is deceptively tricky. It’s not easy to write a song that’s both funny and catchy—let alone 20 of them—but Walk Hard knocks its various pastiches out of the park. There’s the overstuffed Brian Wilson parody "Black Sheep"; the raspy, nonsensical Bob Dylan riff "Royal Jelly"; and the title track, "Walk Hard," which could easily be mistaken for an actual, long-lost Johnny Cash cut.
And that’s the key to what makes Walk Hard so great: It really, really nails this stuff. The movie’s plot hits every beat of your standard self-serious music biopic—the tragic childhood, the unresolved daddy, the failed marriages, the drug use, the suspicious way in which a beloved hit song comes together almost instantly—with the proper balance of absurdism to show how creaky and manipulative most of those movies really are. And musically, most of the songs are catchy enough to stand up alongside the songs they’re parodying.
It takes a lot of talented, knowledgable, passionate people to put together a truly great spoof with this much specificity and care. Which is why it’s such a bummer that Walk Hard flopped so hard. At a time when the spoof movie has largely been lost to garbage like Disaster Movie and 50 Shades of Black, Walk Hard is the rare example of a parody that’s actually better than the movies it’s lampooning.
And now that it’s on Netflix, maybe modern audiences will finally find it and recognize its greatness. Today, the average person is way more likely to watch 1980’s Airplane! than they are to watch the disaster movies it was spoofing, like Zero Hour! or Airport 1975. If there’s any justice in the world, future generations will turn to Walk Hard long before they bother with Ray or Walk the Line.
