Hear me out, Walk Hard (2007) is the greatest musician biopic ever made. Why is that, you ask? Because it is completely and utterly taking the piss out of every biopic ever made before and after it came out. Cribbing heavily from Walk the Line (2005), this Judd Apatow-scripted, Jake Kasdan-directed parody manages to send up films that weren’t even made yet, like Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Elvis (2022), which makes me wonder why those films were even made in the first place since they cleaved so strongly to the formula that Walk Hard relentlessly mocks.
In fact, Rolling Stone pointed this out in 2018, so I’m hardly the first person to wonder why anyone would ever bother to make a musician biopic ever again, considering how brutally perfect Walk Hard was at pointing out that reducing a complex human being into three acts spanning a lifetime of work is pretty much absurd once you take half a step back. And yet, here we are.
Costumed by Debra McGuire, whose past efforts include quite a bit of well known modern films helmed by Judd Apatow, such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), and Knocked Up (2007), as well as cult hits Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), Idiocracy (2006), and Superbad (2007), and not to mention her work on 234 episodes of Friends (1994-2004). Her costumes in Walk Hard span the 1930s through to the 1990s, but the emphasis is on the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s as far as the bulk of the costuming content in the film goes. So let’s take a look!
Have you watched Walk Hard (2007)? Tell us your thoughts in the comments!
Not eligible under Frock Flick rules, but I prefer “Weird,” about Weird Al (played by Daniel Radcliffe!), his rise to fame, his crash, and those he met on the way.
I’ve come to appreciate Daniel Radcliffe more with each movie I see him in. :)
It is a very rare day when me or my partner don’t swap quotes from this film. We love it SO much and, yes, it has completely improved/ruined the ability to watch music biopics seriously.
I’ve never met anyone else who loves this movie as much as I do! I’m among my people and I feel seen!
I watched this instead of “Walk The Line.” I don’t regret my choice.
I lost count of Dewey’s kids around 20. The whole film was hysterical.
The whole weed scene is perfection. “You don’t want no part of this shit!”
Coming here to say more of the same — this mockumentary has only improved with age!
No, I’ve never seen this movie, but after reading this post I might watch it! But I’m pretty sure my dad and/or at least one of my uncles had that velour track suit.
And you never once paid for drugs. Not once!
Speaking of the formula, someone else did a [video] essay about this too.
Patrick (H) Willems made a video called “The Broken Formula of Music Biopics” where he pointed out Walk Hard was perfectly taking the piss out of this format and filmmakers still do it.
This movie is a treasure. It made me fall in love with John C Reilly. Hell it made me fall in love with Jenna Fischer. Also, the song at the finale was actually stellar and transcends the whole send up of the musician biopic so much so that it actually goes so over the top that it goes up over the the top like an out of control swing on a swing set and comes back down and returns as a genuine, biopic of an actual historical musician. I mean, by the end you’re not even sure Dewey Cox was a fictional person. Are you? ARE YOU?
I suspect that fictionalised docu-dramas of the sort this film robustly mocks continue to be made for the same reason that people keep making Austen adaptations and Tudor melodramas: people like them.
It also bears remembering that every stage production, feature film, TV show or any other series attempting to adapt history to entertain and (if possible) educate has been ignoring the inconvenient details since Shakespeare at the very least (Actually I’d put money on Aristophanes getting there first with THE PERSIANS), so there’s no reason Rockstar Dramas can’t be enjoyed when played for satire or played straight down the line.