This Dork Reporter finds most so-called biopics want­ing. The two to three hour fea­ture film is more akin to an essay or short story than a book, and as such is ill-equipped to sum up the entire life of a human being in more than a string of high­lights. And yet stu­dios and film­mak­ers keep keep churn­ing out parades of Clas­sics Illustrated-like films that seem to exist mostly to grant actors Oscars and Golden Globes based on their abil­i­ties to imi­tate his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. The best of them ought more deservedly to be rec­og­nized for their abil­i­ties to cre­ate new char­ac­ters from whole cloth.

But I reserve a spe­cial degree of hate for musi­cal biopics; I’m look­ing at you, Bird, Ray, Walk the Line, La Vie en Rose, and El Can­tante! They all seem to forged from the same tem­plate of trou­bled genius beset by addic­tion, and the women that love them. Com­fort­ingly, the exis­tence of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story proves I’m not alone in bemoan­ing this most pathetic genre. Walk Hard touches on each cliché in turn: phys­i­cal infir­mity (Cox is trag­i­cally “nose blind”), drugs, dis­ap­prov­ing par­ent, dead sib­ling, etc.

pssst… your bouf­fant is cramp­ing my style

At its best, direc­tor and co-writer (with Judd Apa­tow) Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard is a his­tory of pop­u­lar music and nar­cotics from the 1950s on. The chameleonic Cox evolves with the times, begin­ning as a diamond-in-the-rough Ray Charles, break­ing through like a young Johnny Cash, becom­ing a pop super­star Elvis Pres­ley, pass­ing through a Bob Dylan folkie stage, and end­ing up as a Brian Jones, an obses­sive pop genius unable to com­plete his unachiev­able mas­ter­piece (like Jones’ own noto­ri­ous Smile). The best run­ning gag in the movie involves Cox’s con­cur­rent drug addic­tions (pot, cocaine, heroin, pills, and, well, every­thing…), which no doubt gave the MPAA a heart attack.

Lest I sound like I’m prais­ing the film for being clever, here’s the bad news. The self-proclaimed “The Unbear­ably Long, Self-Indulgent Director’s Cut” DVD edi­tion repeats the same jokes over and over. Its idea of hilar­ity is to repeat the name “Cox” as much as pos­si­ble, which should give some hint as to the over­all level of sophis­ti­ca­tion. Each char­ac­ter explic­itly ver­bal­izes and expli­cates the genre clichés and their own char­ac­ter types: the unsup­port­ive starter wife, the doomed sib­ling, the venal music stu­dio boss, and the dis­ap­prov­ing father (whose refrain “The wrong kid died!” fol­lows Cox through his life as both curse and moti­va­tion). His­tor­i­cal celebrity cameos are repeat­edly sign­posted with their full names, lest any­one in the audi­ence not catch on that the batch of four candy-colored lads from Liv­er­pool noodling on sitars in an Indian ashram are, in fact, The Bea­t­les. It is great fun, how­ever, to see Jack Black, Jason Schwartz­man, Paul Rudd, and Jack White do their best Paul McCart­ney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and Elvis Pres­ley, respectively.

The 70s were a decade of taste and restraint

One lit­tle quib­ble: as the char­ac­ters age, the makeup jobs are actu­ally too good, far bet­ter than, say the out­ra­geously silly age makeup for Jen­nifer Con­nelly and Rus­sell Crowe in A Beau­ti­ful Mind. This unfor­tu­nately ruins the gen­uinely funny gag that John C. Reilly plays Cox as a teenager with no attempt to hide his age. Why not carry it through to the end, with Reilly look­ing exactly the same as Cox is sup­posed to be 70?

Does any­body remem­ber when John C. Reilly was a seri­ous actor? I’m happy for him that he’s no doubt build­ing a sig­nif­i­cant nest egg off his recent string of low­brow come­dies (Tal­ladega Nights, Step Broth­ers, etc.), but I hope we will see more of the fine actor of Syd­ney (aka Hard Eight), Boo­gie Nights, and The Hours?

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Offi­cial movie site: www.walkhard-movie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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