So is it a satire or a spoof? They might sound the same, but there's very distinct line separating the forms of parody that's consistently crossed by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Of course, this is just an intellectual argument to consider the big question: Why isn't this movie that funny? And why does a 90-minute comedy seem to drag on and on? Sure, it's got its moments—some pretty good ones at that—but in its quest to lampoon the musician biopic (a genre in dire need of ridiculing), Walk Hard veers around too much in tone and joke styling to work.

Some of the humor is subtle, subversive stuff, a kind of mild prodding at the conventions of a rise-to-fame, fall-from-grace, rise-to-honor story, and those jokes work. It's when writers Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan, who also directed, abandon the satire and get downright silly that the movie suffers from hit-or-miss syndrome. Unfortunately, a lot of those jokes play for the obvious gag, and the ones that don't are typically more random than in line with the material.

"I need Cox," a stage manager yells (This should give you an idea of the level of sophistication to the gags), but before Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly) can go on stage, he has to think about his entire life. So we flash back to Alabama, 1946, where a young Dewey (Conner Rayburn) is playing with his brother, a genuine musical prodigy. They run off to play and, being young, talk about how they have their whole lives ahead of them. We know the brother will die. Will it be by playing with a bull, a tractor, or a horse?

It would be unfair to reveal the means of the brother's demise, but I will say after the clever, unspoken play on the genre necessity, it's the first of the movie's many random, barefaced jokes. Pa Cox (Raymond J. Barry) says the wrong son died, a recurring motif for the man for the rest of the movie. Dewey discovers he has a talent for the blues; after all, he can sing about his dead brother. At the age of 14, Dewey (now played by Reilly, juxtaposed with other actual teenagers), wins a talent show, runs off with his 12-year-old sweetheart Edith (Kristen Wiig), and starts on his path to becoming a musician.

This should sound familiar, and that's because the story is a blatant take on the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. I didn't mention, though, that after tragedy befalls Dewey's brother (in a play on Ray) Dewey loses his sense of smell. The anosmia is one thing, but he also has a family growing larger seemingly on a day-to-day basis, a young wife who tells him, "I do believe in you; I just think you'll fail," and a janitorial job at a nightclub. He comes up with song ideas in the middle of his life ("Don't you dare write a song right now," his wife screams during a fight). This section of Dewey's story works consistently.<