WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY [R]

It’s impossible to keep a good comedy writer down. Judd Apatow has seen three projects hit the screen this year: hot on the heels of Superbad and Knocked Up comes Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a riff on musical biopics that both celebrates and annihilates its source material.

Walk Hard follows the fortunes of musical legend Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly), who rises from a tragic, impoverished childhood (complete with machete incident, dead brother, and embittered father whose favorite line is the great running gag, “The wrong kid died!”). Cox attains fame, fortune and everything that goes with it: promiscuity, a wrecked home life, and an angel-dust fueled public rampage. This is Walk the Line on harder class-A substances, with a side dish of deliberate absurdity: we expect to see a child actor play the 8-year-old Dewey, but when John C. Reilly pops up as the 14-year-old version, we know Apatow and his co-writer Jake Kasdan, who also directed the film, aren’t going to allow little things like logic or realism to get in the way. Showing 8-year-old Dewey (Connor Rayburn) how to position his finders on a guitar to make a chord in the key of E, Honeyboy Williams hardly blinks when suddenly the kid starts playing a complex blues riff and singing in a whiskey-soaked voice, “I done a bad thing.”

The movie borrows from other sources, too; there’s a little Ray in here, and a dash of Bird, and even a backhanded flirtation with The Jazz Singer, in a scene in which Dewey, now 15, married, and a father, subs in for a black singer at a club where, as the overwrought owner declares, “People come to dance e-rot-i-cally!”). But instead of rioting when Dewey declares in song, “(Mama) You Gots To Love Your Negro Man,” the club’s patrons decide Dewey’s got groove and proceed to get their freak on.

But the movie is mostly rooted in Walk the Line, and re-imagines certain elements from the Johnny Cash biopic in a manner so over-the-top, even while keeping a dead-straight face, that while we should be offended, somehow we aren’t; Apatow and Kasdan’s sense of mischief takes the film, time and again, to the brink of bad taste, only for their imagination and wile to redeem the material. Frankie Muniz cast in the role of Buddy Holly? A straightforward phone conversation between Cox and his wife back home that plays like a more salacious Almost Famous, with naked roadies and band-mates cavorting with multiple groupies? A hugely winking, provocative dissertation on the benefits of marijuana bracketed by the facts that grass is non-addictive, doesn’t leave you with a hangover, and makes sex even better prompting Cox to take his first step on the road to LSD trips with the Beatles, jail time, and a frenetic rehab scene that plays like something from a Jim Abrahams and David Zucker flick: all it’s missing is Leslie Nielsen in a doctor’s coat quipping deadpan, “Yes I’m serious, and don’t call me Shirley.”

But the film has a genuine sentiment about it, as well, and for all that it makes fun of excess and redemption, it really does explore those themes with a nearly hidden intelligence. Sure, Dewey’s road to true happiness involves time spent getting to know his 22 kids… wait, make that 36 kids… but that doesn’t make the sentimental smile that overtakes the horse-laughs any less sincere, and the way Jenna Fischer (in June Carter Cash mode) tackles her role as Dewey’s love interest is a pure delight (even if his passion for her leads Dewey to become, erm, a polygamist).

Reilly’s performance is note-perfect (in every applicable sense of the word), and this role proves that his turn in the movie A Prairie Home Companion, where he duetted filthy comic songs with Woody Harrelson, was no fluke. (An even filthier number called “Let’s Duet” between with Fischer takes the cake this time around.)

Walk Hard is monumentally, majestically stupid, but in the smartest and most entertaining way possible.••• –Kilian Melloy

Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.