“Starman” in Walk Hard

OK, one more of these— Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story is a 2007 comedy starring John C. Reilly as the fictional rock star, Dewey Cox. It’s a parody of just about every rock star biographical movie, almost all of which follow the same formula. Actually, the movie was prescient because movies like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man hadn’t been made yet, but they and others follow pretty similar story formulas as movies like Ray and Walk the Line, which Walk Hard was more directly making fun of.

Anyway, as part of the fictional story, the once edgy and innovative Cox rides the wave of different passing musical fads, including a very tamed version of Glam Rock, a few years after Glam was itself edgy and had since become defanged and mainstreamed. The joke is conveyed by this sequence, where a space-suited Dewey Cox performs on a late-70s style variety show. His voice of song? “Starman.” John C. Reilly is not trying to sound like Bowie here, he’s trying to sound like a lounge singer (think Bill Murray’s Saturday Night Live lounge singer character). If the stylized dancers and soft-rock instrumentals were not enough, Reilly ends the song with about a minute of doobie-doobie-do style improvisation to take the song out. It’s all very funny.

And it is very funny, but I have to say, like the movie itself, it should have been funnier. I saw the movie in the theaters and had a vague recollection of a Bowie sequence, but I not only forgot that Reilly performed “Starman” but in my memory it was a much shorter sequence and the song was in in the style of past-its-prime Glam rock, but new to the movie. I’m not about to watch the movie again any time soon, so maybe this is a video taken from the complete performance, only a segment of which was used in the actual film. Or maybe my memory is just way off— but that’s a sign that the gag really wasn’t memorable.

I don’t mean to be harsh. Taken, especially on its own, the video and Reilly’s tounge-in-cheek performance are amusing.

There are many, many more examples of this song being used in movies or movie trailers. I might revisit a few others in the future.