This is probably my favorite part of Walk Hard because, despite the wet willy that this movie gives to every movie that had been or would be made about rock stars, this is the wettest and sloppiest and spittiest of them all. In the song “Guilty as Charged,” which provides us the lyrical background for the pleasantly deranged visuals of the accompanying montage, the imagery of misdeeds and punishment loom large. In Dewey’s actual life, we manage to squeeze in a whole bunch of the funniest moments in the film.

There’s another one of those scenes where Dewey is introduced by accident to a whole new set of drugs, although this time it’s suggested that pills are “the next logical step for you.” “Does Dewey seem unhappy to you?” one of his band members asks another. Cut to Dewey sobbing on the other side of the bus. A woman rides Dewey, motionless and wearing sunglasses, and asks him another important question. “Dewey, are you enjoying yourself?” Dewey stirs a little. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says. “I forgot you were here.” Sex excepted, this basically sums up my experience with the second half of Walk the Line, in which I suppose Johnny Cash is still a character but I cannot for the life of me remember anything he does. All of this leads up to two exclamation points. One is the end of “Guilty as Charged,” where Dewey holds his hands out and wrists up, signifying the handcuffs he’s always wearing either metaphorically or, ultimately, in real life. The other is Dewey midcoitus shouting, “Goddammit, this is a dark fucking period!” before taking a large swig of booze.

I love this line. I laugh every time I look at it because of how perfect the expression is. It’s so close to being an honest and unironic expression of despair, a cry to the heavens, maybe even a Biblical lamentation worthy of some minor prophet-troubadour. The line itself is written in iambic hexameter, which is not usually how you find your hexameter, but I think it’s fitting. We’re a long way from “The Destruction of Sennacherib” and the scathing glory of Byron’s anapests. Dewey Cox would not be able to identify an anapest (or an iamb, clearly) any sooner than he’d be able to identify a botulinum, but there’s a poetry inside this doofus where even his haziest and most addled despair turns into something that could be put to music. “I’m abusing pills varied and myriad/Goddammit, this is a dark fucking period,” etc.