Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Life of Chuck.
The recurring musical in 2025’s The Life of Chuck is a real movie, and it has major significance in the overarching story. Mike Flanagan directed The Life of Chuck, which is based on the 2020 Stephen King novella of the same name. The story contains three acts, told in reverse chronological order. Act 3 involves an apocalyptic event marked by billboards thanking ordinary accountant Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) for 39 great years, Act 2 follows Chuck spontaneously dancing on the street, and Act 1 follows young Chuck (Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay) through his first encounters with death.
There are many elements that link the three acts of The Life of Chuck, emphasizing the ways that the people and pᴀssions that influence the character, an ordinary accountant, are part of the fabric of his life. This includes recurring members of the Life of Chuck cast playing different characters, multiple recitations of excerpts of the Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself,” and a variety of references to the work of astronomer Carl Sagan. Another element that is more obliquely referenced, but appears multiple times throughout the movie’s three acts, is a series of clips from a single classic musical.
The Characters In The Life Of Chuck Are Watching Cover Girl
The Movie Musical Debuted In 1944
The movie musical that keeps appearing throughout 2025’s The Life of Chuck is 1944’s Cover Girl, a major Hollywood hit during World War II that was directed by Charles Vidor and features music by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin. It follows Rusty Parker (Rita Hayworth), a dancer at a nightclub in Brooklyn that is owned by her boyfriend Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly). However, when she wins a contest to be pH๏τographed for a magazine cover, her career begins to take off, putting strain on their relationship.
[Cover Girl] was one of a series of movie musicals that Chuck watched with his grandmother, Sarah…
The movie is not mentioned in the original Life of Chuck book, but it is revealed in Act 1 of the movie that it was one of a series of movie musicals that Chuck watched with his grandmother, Sarah (Mia Sara), as she shared her love of dancing with him. While they watched a number of other iconic movies, including Cabaret and All That Jazz, Cover Girl is the only movie that has clips shown throughout the movie, suggesting that it had a particular impact on Chuck during his formative years.
Why Cover Girl Keeps Appearing In The Life Of Chuck
Dance Plays An Important Role In Chuck’s Life
While the plot of Cover Girl does not have any direct bearing on what happens in The Life of Chuck, the tone of the movie definitely does. The 1944 film is a particularly splashy musical, featuring Gene Kelly pushing the envelope with a number of exhilarating dance sequences including one where he is dancing with a mirror image of himself. It makes sense why the whirl of color and movement in the movie would capture the imagination of a young child who is just learning to love the art of dancing.
Another ambitious musical number in Cover Girl features the characters performing while walking down a long street, all of which is captured in a single, unbroken sH๏τ.
The movie’s link to that time in his life explains why both it and the scene of his grandma teaching him how to dance are things that he thinks about when he begins dancing to the rhythm of the drums of a street busker (Taylor Gordon), surprising even himself. By fueling his love of dancing, it inspired him to break into a dance during an otherwise ordinary day many years later, changing the lives of multiple people around him in the process.
Cover Girl playing on Marty’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) television right before it cuts out during Act 3 also shows how the movie is continuing to spark memories in Chuck’s brain while he is on his deathbed, which is directly linked to the apocalyptic event depicted in that part of the story.
Cover Girl Has A Hidden Stephen King Connection
The Life Of Chuck Is Linked To A Classic Adaptation
Cover Girl appearing in The Life of Chuck also provides a subtle reference to another iconic Stephen King movie. Both 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption and the original 1982 novella feature the imprisoned character Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) using a poster of Cover Girl star Rita Hayworth to cover up an escape tunnel that he is digging. Both Chuck and Shawshank are rare non-horror adaptations of King’s work, so this reference allows Flanagan to give a subtle nod to an important predecessor.
