Great in moments...But marred by too immature humor and senseless vulgarity.

Rating: 6/10 (11 May 2008)

This flick has some great nuances that poke at a fictional musician who is obviously a composite character of all the usual suspects in the post WWII era to present. It nails our absurd pop culture past. It can be wickedly funny doing so. Unfortunately, it also has a tendency to dumb itself way down into the territory of infantile vulgarity. Not to be a prude, but the heavy handed crudeness serves to mar the excellent work of John C. Reilly.
Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan need to go back and watch the Farrelly Brothers catalog. There is an art to mixing tasteless humor, political incorrectness, and making it all acceptable and hilarious. They aren't in that special spot where one overlooks the crudeness-which seems forced not funny. Reaching that "spot" can be like tap dancing around land mines, remaining funny to the extreme and tasteful enough that crudeness it isn't an issue, I see this as the "acid test" that separates the brilliant from the hack. While Apatow and Kasdan are certainly way past the hack stage they can still indulge themselves too much and fall glaringly flat on their face. It helps, as displayed here, there are moments of great sly humor mixed in-Yet it doesn't, overall, end up totally redeeming the faux pas committed.
I wish I could have absolutely recommended this without reservations. John C. Reilly really is up to the task and turns in a good performance in spite of the writing/directing lapses. I just keep wishing this could have been a Farrelly or a Leiner,Hurwitz, and Schlossberg (Harold-Kumar) project. They would have been able to keep the low-brow humor from being too pervasive.