As a rule, I’m a Judd Apatow fan, and have been since I became aware of him in the mid 1990s as the writer of the summer camp comedy Heavyweights and a contributor to The Larry Sanders Show and The Critic. His career has taken off in the past few years as the director of Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin, and as the leader of an entourage that has started to spin off films of its own (like this summer’s Superbad.). But that’s not to say that everything his name is on is gold, and Walk Hard, which he co-wrote, takes a place on the discard pile, along with the Jim Carrey remake of Fun with Dick and Jane.

The fault of the movie lies less with Apatow than with director Jake Kasdan, who seems to have no idea how to shape and pace parody. Written in the mode of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker movies (Airplane! et al.), Walk Hard parodies musical biographies. It’s an old genre that has been popular recently with Ray and Walk the Line, both of which served to remind audiences just how standardized this kind of story tends to be. Kasdan and Apatow, who share the writing credit, wrote down every cliché usually found in movies about musicians and strung them together into a screenplay. And that’s exactly what it plays like, a collection of loosely organized gags. Some are funny, but even the good ones suffer from Kasdan’s slack direction. When you laugh, it’s because he doesn’t get in the way of a good joke, but more often I found myself noting throwaways that could have been funny had they been prepared and framed with a little more care.

As the singer whose career variously resembles that of Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Brian Wilson, the reliable John C. Reilly does his best, and is surprisingly good in some of the musical performances, though I doubt that will be what anyone is paying to see. But Walk Hard is a cheap-looking, lazily filmed comedy that seldom rises above the level of a Saturday Night Live skit.