Walk Hard could never kill the musical biopic, says James Mangold

Walk Hard looms large over the “musician biopic” genre. Though not a major box office success, the cult classic has only become more appreciated over time as a pitch-perfect parody of the genre’s various tropes and clichés. Star John C. Reilly has even said that “we tried to kill the musical biopic with this movie.” Some might say that it worked; there was a brief fallow period for the genre following the 2007 release of Walk Hard. But in the opinion of James Mangold—who directed Walk The Line, one of the parody’s most obvious references—that was just the natural life cycle of cinema. 

As Mangold proposes to Entertainment Weekly, rock biopics had simply “run their course for that moment.” He adds, “It takes so long to make a movie that I don’t think things operate in quite the instantaneous fashion where everyone suddenly stays away.”

Mangold reiterates previous sentiments about Walk Hard, including that he found it really funny but also doesn’t understand why a successful satire would end a genre. “I wasn’t frightened off any more than Robert Eggers should be frightened of making a monster movie in the face of Young Frankenstein or if another filmmaker might be frightened of making a Western in the face of Blazing Saddles,” he says. “It’s unfair to say that if someone makes a satire of a genre, it somehow has put a tombstone in the genre for all time. That seems a little ludicrous to me.” 

In fact, he has returned to the genre with A Complete Unknown, and pledges to remain “resolutely optimistic and idealistic in my work.” (For what it’s worth, Timothée Chalamet turned Walk Hard off after five minutes because it nearly made him doubt his choice to play Bob Dylan). “I don’t want to be satire’d out of telling the stories. Just because they have echoes in other stories, that doesn’t mean they’re not relevant,” Mangold says. “We live in an age of such irony that sometimes there’s good cliches to avoid, but there’s also some things that we should hold on to. Trope is not a negative word if you look it up.”