Jud Apatow provides a comic history of modern American culture.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story has already dropped off the top ten list of movie box office draws, after only a couple of weeks in general release. It appears to have been held back by the lack of a big star, as although John C. Reilly gives a good performance, he doesn’t have the charisma to draw people into theaters to see him.

That’s a shame, because the movie is both funny and pointed.

Produced and co-written by Jud Apatow (Kicking and Screaming, The 40-Year-Old Virgin,, Talladega Nights, Knocked Up, Superbad) and cowritten and directed by Jake Kasdan (Freaks and Geeks, Zero Effect, Orange County), it’s actually a superb summary of the evolution of American culture of the past half-century, with all of its variety, power, increasing vulgarity, and (very) occasional sublimity.

The performances are superb, including Reilly’s but also those of Jenna Fischer (The Office), Raymond J. Barry (The X Files), Kristin Wiig, and Tim Meadows. There are also several funny cameo performances by well-known performers sprinkled throughout.

The film is very funny, and features some hilarious, classic scenes, such as the repeated unsuccessful attempts of Dewey’s drug-abusing bandmate to talk Dewey out of trying various drugs, using arguments that make drug abuse sound attractive and harmless. That, too, has been a big part of the post World War II American culture, which I call the Omniculture.

Similarly, a scene where Dewey meets the Beatles at the Maharishi Yogi’s compound in India is brilliantly funny and captures the absurdity of the pop religious fads which have swept the nation over the past few decades.

Scenes comically exaggerating the power of Jews in the entertainment business and the culture in general also make a very good cultural point, without being at all offensive.

And a sequence in which Dewey speaks of meeting a certain famous murderer replays an event in the Beach Boys’ history and comically evokes both the nexus of entertainment and violence in recent decades and the news media’s voracious appetite for sensational stories that have little real meaning but are meant to draw audiences through emotional displays calculated to evoke pity and terror.

As the film’s title suggests, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is every bit as vulgar and insane as what so much of our current has to offer, and it includes copious foul language, nudity, innuendo (and explicitness), drug abuse, violence, and the like. Yet it also reflects some of the refined things in the culture, such as our stubborn fealty to family, community, and faith that still shine through here and there.

Even these things the film treats with a great deal of humor, but at least they’re there. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is a good cultural history lesson, and it’s also a very entertaining one.