The best fake biopic in the business

Rating: 9/10 (23 December 2007)

There are any number of reasons to hate this movie. For one, it can be repetitive. For another, it can be tasteless. Actually, those are the only two reasons I can think of to dislike this movie, which you should be expecting given previous Judd Apatow works when you go in.
The thing that makes this movie truly great is that it is, whether or not you notice, the first American Hot Fuzz. Here is a genre parody so great that I think it would fly over the heads of people who haven't seen enough biopics or don't know enough rock 'n' roll history. There is that good old tasteless humor characteristic of Apatow films that could keep even the casual moviegoer laughing, but really what we have is a very studied recreation of the biopic that shakes a stick at trends we've seen but may not have noticed were trends.
Dewey Cox goes through the phases of, essentially, every major music star between the '50s and the '70s. On the surface you'll find Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but those are definitely not the only ones whose surprisingly formulaic lives and their consequent biopics are parodied (even, impressively, the recent Dylan biopic I'm Not There seems to be parodied stylistically, though it seems odd to suggest that Walk Hard consciously called the off-beat touch of I'm Not There months ahead of its release). What this really is, is a work of genius, a biopic that is really only necessarily funny because you know Dewey Cox did not really exist.
Perhaps the tasteless and obvious jokes are not enough to give this movie the longevity it might deserve, but the perfection it attains in satirizing the biopic should. The audience I was with got so hooked on Dewey Cox that I saw more than one tear fall in the duration of the movie. By the end, even I really cared about the fake recording star, although I did not really expect to. I think the cleverest thing of all about the film is that their invented Dewey Cox is not really half bad. It would have been easy to make that the big joke, that millions of people were falling for the music of Dewey Cox, too stupid to realize he sucked, but it's impressive because Dewey Cox, and his songs, for the most part, do not suck. Some of the numbers he performs are legitimately good songs. John C. Reilly does not always play the role comedically. I think that's what ultimately makes it memorable and good.
So maybe if you see it, you won't like it, because it's often rude or you haven't seen or cared for enough biopics to play "Spot the Genre Parody." Fair enough. But if you want to see a movie so carefully put-together that it gives you chills, this is a good one to check out.