At a packed screening for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s R-rated teen comedy Superbad at Comic-Con International, the packed audience was treated to a preview of the musical-comedy Walk Hard, starring John C. Reilly as blues singer Dewey Cox. Co-written by Superbad producer Judd Apatow with Jake Kasdan (The TV Set), who also directed it, it seems to liberally spoof the recent Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.
The trailer opens with a similar scene of an audience chanting for someone to come onstage, and a man goes backstage to talk to another guy standing in the shadows. “Mr Cox?” he asks, and he’s informed that Dewey Cox only goes on after he thinks about his whole life, and we get one of those flashback sequences where it quickly winds through hundreds of images back to a scene of a toddler holding a guitar as two black bluesmen urge him on to try to play and he starts adeptly playing the guitar and singing the blues in a surprisingly deep voice. “And that’s just his first time!”
We were laughing too hard to take proper notes but there’s a lot of funny scenes in the trailer with appearances by other musicians like the Beatles, Elvis and even Eddie Vedder–no, not the real musicians but lookalikes that don’t try too hard to look like them–and a good amount of physical comedy. Some scenes seem to deliberately spoof Walk the Line with Jenna Fischer even looking a bit like Reese Witherspoon’s June Carter. In one scene, Reilly’s Cox yells at her, “You can take my kids, but you can’t take my monkey!” and it cuts to a monkey sitting in a chair pretty as you please.
The trailer ended on a montage of Cox recounting his achievements in a voice-over, ending with an ad of Dewey holding up a box of pork sausage and saying the slogan, “It doesn’t say Cox unless I say that it tastes like Cox.” (ba dum bum) It then cuts to the logo, which will follow in the footsteps of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy by having a subtitle, this one being Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
Superbad opens on August 17 and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story opens on December 14.
