There’s so bad it’s good, and there’s so lame it twitches. It just lies there and twitches. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story isn’t funny. Except for “You’ve Got to Love Your Negro Man,” but that relies on the race angle. The movie’s a bit of a Gen X echo bounce off the baby boomers, a late-in-the-day contribution to the Great Hall of Post-1960s Hollywood Go-for-It Gross Comedy Romps, so black skin (or white skin) and rock music are among the topics on hand, and so are drugs, farts, sex, and cliched scenes from earlier films.
The year was 2007 and Across the Universe came out, and back when George H.W. Bush had just been elected, somebody raised a laugh by floating the slogan “We Can End the ’60s In Your Lifetime.” Almost 20 years before Walk Hard paraded its corpse version of baby-boom rebellion and uproariousness, we’d all been wondering if 1960s nostalgia could ever end. Walk Hard and Across the Universe showed that it had ended, but what a way to find out. (Not that Across the Universe is so bad; a lot of the staging is excellent. But its story is such a standard, Time-Life rendition of the counterculture years, and the box office indicates no one had time for another go-round of that sort.)
Walk Hard falls into an unusual pop-culture hole. Baby-boom nostalgia had been done to death, yet this parody of music bios couldn’t find any rock movies to travesty. The Doors and… what? Instead Dewey Cox is a Country-rockabilly performer, as in Walk the Line, Great Balls of Fire, and The Buddy Holly Story. That’s three movies instead of one, but Jim Morrison was funnier than the guys those movies were about, and Oliver Stone’s funny too. If you have to show that the baby-boom zany romp lives on, do a number on Stone and Morrison and Wall Street and so on—the old Indian in the desert, the split screen, the different film stocks and exposures, helicopters in Vietnam, the camera spinning around and trying to punch you. But 2007 has come and gone, and the baby boom’s now just a bunch of boomers; as far as the public’s concerned, the once great cultural tide’s long forgotten and in its place we have crabby old fogies. If boomers do any go-for-it gross romping now, it’s by means of government.
Beatles caveat. Sam Mendes plans four films about the Beatles, each retracing the band’s story from the viewpoint of a different member of the group. I like to think that love of the Beatles has survived nostalgia for the 1960s. Is there enough of this love to keep four movies afloat? Hollywood thinks so and I’ll take what reassurance I can. As the constitutional order buckles, we may have a deluxe valentine to one of the few things that made this era worthwhile. Or we may have a four-part white elephant to go with the wreckage. Or we may straighten out our craziness and also have some good filmmaking about The Beatles. But I won’t see Walk Hard again, just “Got to Love Your Negro Man” on YouTube.