Happy-Go-Lucky

Flash of Genius

Eagle Eye

Ghost Town

The Duchess

Hounddog

Burn After Reading

Hamlet 2

The House Bunny

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Elegy

Bottle Shock

It's 1946, and young, Alabama farm boy Dewey Cox learns the blues after the accidental "halving" of his kid brother, a piano prodigy. The boy's dying imperative to Dewey: "You'll have to be double great for the both of us." At 14, Dewey (now played by 42-year-old John C. Reilly) leaves Alabama with his gee-tar and his 12-year-old bride (Saturday Night Live's Kristen Wiig) to fulfill his destiny, but takes a job sweeping floors at a juke joint until he gets his big break. Before you can say "Great Balls of Fire" he's sporting a pompadour, headlining for Elvis, smoking reefers and topping the rockabilly charts.

Co-writer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) and co-writer/director Jake Kasdan (Orange County) lampoon rock-and-roll biopics like Ray and Walk the Line in this silly satire featuring a hit parade of supporting actors from The Office, SNL and 30 Rock. Walk Hard knowingly skewers the formulaic narrative arc of the music pic genre, from Dewey's humble beginnings, through his meteoric rise to fame, an unsupportive spouse, drug addiction, infidelity, his eventual fall from grace and ultimate absolution. Along the way, Dewey evolves through a number of recognizable looks and sounds, including an outlaw cum Johnny Cash and a protest-singer à la Bob Dylan, eventually staging a 1970s comeback as star of a disco variety TV show. The movie's most uproarious interlude may be when Dewey -- in his delusional, drug-hazed Brian Wilson stage -- and his second wife (The Office's Jenna Fischer channeling Reese Witherspoon as June Carter) go to India and encounter the Beatles. In the Maharishi's TM tent, John, Paul, George and Ringo (Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Justin Long and Jason Schwartzman) bicker bitterly in uncanny Liverpudlian accents.

Walk Hard peppers Dewey's journey with some insightful, un-P.C. parodies of Hollywood's cultural depictions, from the hilariously pornographic "erotic dancing" of the Negroes in a Deep South jazz club to Cox's big-city music industry reps: all Hasidic Jews replete with sidelocks and yarmulkes. There's also a fair smattering of juvenile Cox jokes and cock shots that broadens Walk Hard's appeal to include not only film buffs and rock-and roll-scholars, but teen acolytes of lowbrow shock comedies of the Superbad ilk, too.

by Rob. Walton

photos: Gemma La Mana/©2007 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and GH Three LLC. All rights reserved.