Highway Star (Korean: 복면달호; RR: Bokmyeon Dalho) is a 2007 South Korean musical comedy film starring Cha Tae-hyun as an aspiring rocker who achieves success as a masked trot singer.
To make a living in his small, rural town, Dal-ho's heavy metal rock band is forced to play trot (country music similar to enka, also known as bbong jjak) in tacky nightclubs.
One day, Jang Joon, executive of a shabby record company, sees potential in the seemingly clueless vocalist and promises to make him a star—Dal-ho realizes too late that he's been duped into signing a contract with a label that specializes in trot music.
Jang believes that Dal-ho's talent as a trot singer is in reflecting the melodramatic sentimentality of middle-aged Koreans (the genre's target demographic), but Dal-ho persistently believes that trot music, along with the gaudy costumes and hairstyles and exaggerated stage movements associated with it, is outdated and trite.
However, the strange strategy works; his voice rocks the nation and his album sales climb the music charts.