If you’ve never seen Walk Hard before but still get déjà vu from just its first 10 minutes, that's the point. This riotous pastiche parodies every musician biopic ever made — and even many that came after it. Its ability to predict the future is thanks to its sharp observation of all the clichés that are typically wheeled out when a musical artist’s life story gets the big screen treatment. Walk Hard skewers everything from the tropes of preternatural musical abilities and galvanizing childhood trauma to the formulaic three-act structure that follows the musician’s rise, inevitable fall, and triumphant rise again.

Absolutely no chances are left unseized to lampoon the genre: the film is told in an incredibly long flashback, for example, and features multiple groan-including moments in which characters say the movie’s title out loud, all but winking at the camera. The danger with a parody is that the joke can get old quickly, but Walk Hard is blessedly full of laughs that would stand up even outside of the spoof framework, displaying incredible devotion to even the most throwaway of jokes (as when The Temptations make a cameo for one five-second gag). Not just a brilliant satire, then, but a terrific comedy of its own.

Dewey’s life story takes us on a whirlwind tour of musical eras: beginning in Elvis’ heyday, we watch as he invents punk music and enters the ‘60s (which are, as a character helpfully spells out for us, "an important and exciting time”) and beyond. Along the way, the fictional Dewey interacts with real musical legends and their work, like Elvis (played by Jack White), Bob Dylan (whom Reilly does a brilliant imitation of), and The Beatles. The scene in which he meets the latter at a meditation retreat in India is absurdly good, and not just because Paul Rudd does a solid John Lennon impression. It’s another example of the movie going hard where it doesn’t even need to —  the hallmark of a great comedy.