Ty Rewatches "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"

The other day I mentioned that I was rewatching some movies that I haven't seen in awhile, and that I enjoyed, but it has been so long, I wanted to see if I still like them. Last night I stumbled across one such movie that, when I saw it in the theaters 13 years ago I loved.

The movie is "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story", and let me tell you, this movie more than holds up. I found myself laughing just as much as when I first saw it. I saw some things that I may have missed. I appreciated John C Reilly's performance about a thousand times more than the first time I watched it. Same thing with Jenna Fischer. In fact, I even found that the side characters were way, way funnier than I first thought. And the story, my goodness, was it was very perfectly crafted.

"Walk Hard" is the story of a fictional musician, Dewey Cox, and it tells of his rise to fame, his problems, his misfortunes,  the way up to his death while performing at an event that was held for him. This is all done to comedic perfection. "Walk Hard" came out a little bit after a ton of fictional movies about musicians were being made. I, and many other people say, this movie is basically a parody of "Walk the Line", the Johnny Cash movie. It is nearly a remake, with comedy tones, at the beginning. But then the movie goes in a million different directions, and it all works and it is all so funny. Like I said before, Reilly is so great. He, for one, is a trained singer and musician, so I give him a ton of credit for playing and singing all the songs in the movie. And the way he goes from genre to genre, from year to year, it is great. He starts out as a church/gospel singer, then does some groovy, funky music, then does country, then punk rock, then classic rock, then Bob Dylan esque folk music, then trippy psychedelic music, to variety show music, then back to his roots for his final, "masterpiece", song. And he does them all so well. When he is doing the country stuff, the songs are so hilarious and catchy. "Walk Hard", his hit is great. Then when he starts working with Darlene, Jenna Fischer, he totally embodies Cash, but the songs lyrics are goofy as hell. When he does the psychedelic stuff, and meets The Beatles, played by Jack Black(Paul McCartney), Paul Rudd(John Lennon), Jason Schwartzmann(Ringo Starr) and Justin Long(George Harrison), all of that is so, so wonderful. Seeing those guys play The Beatles, getting into fights and tripping acid with Dewey, it all works. When he gets clean, after being arrested for drugs, we meet his grown up brother, who died by being cut in half by a sword when he and Dewey were young and playing, and he is expertly played by Jonah Hill. Hill is wonderful. After getting clean, he does the variety show stuff, and it is a perfect sendup of that era of TV. When he tries to make amends with his dad, and his dad meets the same demise as his brother, he finally reconnects with his family, his wife and his many, many kids, which lead up to his lifetime achievement award ceremony. This is where he plays his "masterpiece", and like I said, when he finishes the song, he collapses and dies on stage, and it is comedy gold.

Look, all of this is to say, as far as parody movies go, "Walk Hard" is one of the better ones that not many people bring up anymore. It does all the classic tropes of those type of music movies, but putting comedic, improvising style actors makes this movie that much better. While watching it last night with my wife, we both kept saying how great this movie was, and asking why no one else talks about it anymore. I have listened to the soundtrack a few times already today.

"Walk Hard", which falls into my favorite category of TV show and movie right now, lets me escape what is going on in the world right now. I get to forget for a couple of hours, and I am extremely grateful for that. "Walk Hard" is definitely worth another watch, and maybe more and more people will do that now, and we can get this movie the credit that is deserves. Go watch it when you get a chance. We all have the time now.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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