Review Summary: As a rock n’ roll spoof, Walk Hard walks in very prestigious company.
Whether you like or dislike the ‘frat pack’ brand of humour- and evidently many do, judging by the film’s box office bombing-
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was easily one of the more novel movie concepts of last year. Granted, in the era of Michael Bay and Aaron Seltzer, this doesn’t amount to much, but as far as spoof rock n’ roll documentaries,
Walk Hard has at least earned the right to be mentioned alongside
The Rutles,
This Is Spinal Tap and… well, it’s a short list.
Walk Hard follows the life and tribulations of rock legend Dewey Cox, played by the excellent John C. Reilly, from the moment he’s first exposed to blues music aged 6, having just accidentally cut his brother in half with a machete, through mega-stardom in the 50s and 60s and his inevitable artistic decline.
Frequent references are made to the recent biopics
Walk The Line (Johnny Cash),
Beyond The Sea (Bobby Darin) and
Ray (Ray Charles), but
Walk Hard is as much a parody of rock n’ roll itself as it is a spoof on rock mythology- and that’s where the music comes in. Just as the movie plots the career of an artist chronologically over five decades, so too does the soundtrack. Some of the tracks’ influences are obvious. For instance, the slap-back echo and walking bass line of the title track recall Johnny Cash’s ‘Walk The Line,’ while the Mariachi horn-infused ‘Guilty As Charged’ is not just a brilliant satire of Cash’s brand of outlaw rock, it’s just as infectious as the classic yarn ‘Ring Of Fire’ on which it’s loosely based. The album’s one duet, appropriately entitled ‘Let’s Duet,’ mirrors Cash and June Carter’s rendition of Bob Dylan’s ‘It Ain’t Me Babe,’ albeit a vulgarised reflection.
Cox nails Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis (who is brilliantly portrayed in one memorable scene by Jack White) with parenthetical pair ‘(I Hate You) Big Daddy’ and ‘(Mama) You Got To Love Your Negro Man.’ Yet most of
Walk Hard’s influences are a little more subtle than that. ‘Black Sheep’ combines ‘A Day In The Life’-style orchestra excess and Lennonesque raised-pitch vocals with Brian Wilson’s dynamic fusion of surf and psychedelia. ‘Guilty As Charged’ itself owes as much to Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ as it does ‘Ring Of Fire.’ The violent Dylanesque strumming of ‘Let Me Hold You (Little Man)’ boasts a vocal remarkably reminiscent of Billy Joel’s authoritative ‘Piano Man,’ while ‘Dear Mr. President’ walk the line between the idealism of Elston Gunn and the timid sincerity of Art Garfunkel.
Two key elements bind such a diverse range of styles and influences: the songwriters, and Dewey Cox himself. Alt. folk performer Dan Bern, Mike Viola (of power pop group the Candy Snatchers) and Michael Andrews (of Donnie Darko fame), who also produced the soundtrack, head a list of songwriters that also includes Van Dyke Parks and Charlie Wadhams. Parks, noted for his work on the ill-fated Beach Boys-cum-Brian Wilson album
SmiLE, adds his considerable know-how to ‘Black Sheep’ to great (comic) effect, while Bern’s reputation as a prize piss-taker proves to be well-earned as he takes off Dylan at his least coherent (‘Royal Jelly’) and Neil Young at his most self-pitying (‘(Have You Heard The News) Dewey Cox Died.’)
The set, however, belongs to Reilly. Already Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of Amos in
Chicago, he takes on the multitude of styles with ease. His mastery of Bob Dylan’s cadence on ‘Royal Jelly’ is uncanny, choosing to emphasise the most absurd lines as decisively as Dylan would nail his most biting political commentary. He paints
“Shannon Doher-tapestries” and remarks,
“we are so unlucky… and stuff,” before asking
“let me touch you, let me touch you… where the royal jelly gets made.” If his delivery on ‘A Life Without You (Is No Life At All)’ helps emphasise the general Orbison-ity of the track, it’s only a reflection of his “true” voice, Reilly’s own personality, which pervades each of the fifteen tracks and ensures
Walk Hard sounds like a coherent album rather than a mere compilation.
However some of the tracks lose some of their lustre in the translation from screen to disc. ‘(Mama) You Got To Love Your Negro Man’ is only half as amusing without the flabbergasted expressions of the black band and audience to look at. The cutesy 50s pop ballad ‘Take My Hand’ is 100% dependent upon riots in the auditorium, while the Carpenters-Go-Disco rendition of David Bowie’s ‘Starman’ is just plain awful in any situation. Yet prior viewing of the movie isn’t prerequisite to enjoy the
Walk Hard soundtrack. Rock cliches are universal, at least for anybody who’s been white at any point in the last four decades, and the songs are more than strong enough to stand on their own.
Walk Hard will probably never reach the same level of notoriety as
This Is Spinal Tap- it doesn’t offend enough people for that- but as a rock n’ roll spoof it walks in very prestigious company.
