My Review of "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is a comedy that came out back in 2007. Admittedly, this movie isn't for everyone. There is a lot of lewd comedy that includes nudity and controversial situations. Those that are offended easily may have a walk out early on in this movie. As the number of people that can appreciate this movie dwindle, I find myself hoping that this demographic becomes larger. I actually would like more movies like this.

The movie starts off with the introduction of Dewey and his brother Nate at a very young age. They live in a modest household on a farm in the middle of nowhere with their loving parents. This quickly collapses with the death of Nate. Dewey's father never forgives him for the death of Nate and this becomes a running theme. Actually there's a ton of running themes throughout this movie.

Dewey takes up music as Nate was very musical back in the day. He soon grows up to become a musician himself. Before long he becomes a rock star and has the whole stereotypical rockstar lifestyle and we see his rise, fall, rise, fall and another rise.

This movie is utter nonsense at times but I love this. They took the biography of many famous musicians and smooshed them together for Dewey's story. I could recognize so many people that they were emulating. Some of the imitations were so intentional that they even describe the person that they're imitating in the movie.

In doing so, they've identified a ton of the repetitive storylines that we often see musicians get themselves into. Dewey falls into absolutely all of them and does them with such great exaggeration that you can't help but laugh at the silliness of it all. I don't think I could see another biopic about a musician without being reminded of this movie now. This could very well make me laugh at some biographical movies in the future.

This movie is also littered with sight gags and makes fun of different eras in pop culture. They go through the different decades and have Dewey fall into the social norms of the era. He will get into free love, disco, anti-establishment poetry and it continues to more modern times. The only time I kind of got lost in the movie was the time when they were all exploring LSD. I thought this portion of the movie got a little less wacky than it should have been.

I love that this movie also tries to give us the lessons most biographical movies try to send us. Though they did it in a different way. They decided to amalgamate all these messages into one so that nothing is quite so coherent. You can tell that all of these messages are genuine messages that everyone tries to give each other, however, there's always an exact opposite message to that first message. It made me think of how polarized the world is today and Dewey is taking in all of these ideas and pretending to make sense of it. As the viewer this shockingly does make sense. There's no balance in the world as we're all in extremes and we don't evaluate these messages that we're receiving. I didn't expect to take in such a deep meaning from such a ridiculous movie in the end.

Overall, I absolutely loved this movie. Again it can be quite offensive for a lot of people but if you can take it this is quite a wild ride that I can truly recommend. It had me bursting out in laughter and at times rewinding to laugh at the part once again. That's quite rare nowadays and that's why I yearn for more movies like this. I have to give this movie an 8.5 out of 10. This is a classic for me that I will definitely rewatch over and over again.