Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Dewey Cox (Reilly) goes through the stations of the pop-music-biopic cross: the judgmental parent, the song inspired by a casual remark, the slide into substance abuse, the creative impasse and the late-career moment of affirmation. Screenwriters Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan send up every cliché of the genre. Of course, they also include a machete accident played for laughs, a bit of gratuitous full-frontal male nudity—and a monkey. The result is an amusing but uneven mesh of clever material (the songs are dead-on parodies) and Scary Movie–style joke throwing.