Dir: Eric Appel. Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood, Jack Black, Rainn Wilson, Toby Huss, Julianne Nicholson, Quinta Brunson. 108 minutes.
I’ve often heard it said that 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story ruined the music biopic for good. Jake Kasdan’s parodic riff on the genre’s conventions – the troubled childhood, the meteoric rise to fame, the parade of famous faces, the inevitable seduction to the dark side of drink and drugs – felt devastatingly precise. And it can be hard now to watch a scene of any bright young thing nervously ingesting their first narcotic without thinking of Tim Meadows’ Sam and his repeated refrain: “Get out of here, Dewey. You don’t want no part of this s***!”
