Walk the Line

Johnny Cash was a giant — a myth (partly of his own making) — and Walk the Line reduces him to just a man. Some of Cash’s fans may take issue with that, but it’s something that Cash himself, who stripped his sound way down in his final decade, might have approved of. In Walk the Line, John R. Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) is revealed as a country boy with deep self-esteem problems: for instance, he has the Stand by Me scene where his perfect older brother dies and his father rails at God for “taking the wrong son.” John just wants to play music, like the Carter Family on the radio, especially that cute little June Carter. He starts out as a fumbling gospel singer at a time when gospel is on the way out and the axis of rhythm & blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and country are taking over music. Luckily he has his own tune to fall back on, “Folsom Prison Blues” — taken not from hard experience but from a newsreel he saw in the Air Force.

By demythologizing Cash, and taking him so far into self-abnegation that June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) even says “Maybe you should take credit for something,” Walk the Line paradoxically restores the great man’s larger-than-life aura. It was hard work to become “Johnny Cash,” the man who seemed to run against all popular wisdom and come out bigger than ever — releasing a live prison album when nobody thought it would sell; covering Nine Inch Nails in his twilight years, when most singers his age would’ve been happy to sit back and cash the royalty checks. Joaquin Phoenix gets Cash’s early insecurity — he was an original because, frankly, he sucked at being like anyone else. When we first see him perform “Folsom Prison Blues” for record-label honcho Sam Phillips, Phoenix’s Cash begins shakily but gains power and confidence. It’s a primal finding-your-voice moment that reminded me of Kurt Russell blissfully laying down “Blue Moon of Kentucky” in John Carpenter’s Elvis, which this movie most resembles.

The movie, executive-produced by John Carter Cash (the only child of Johnny and June), is structured as a love story between two entertainers married to other people who don’t appreciate their artistry. Cash’s first wife (Ginnifer Goodwin) is drawn as an unimaginative woman who just wants John to go into her daddy’s business. She has a point: he’s got a child to feed and another on the way, and his gospel career is going nowhere. But success soon comes, and with it the by-now-clichéd temptations of sex and drugs. Cash gets hooked on amphetamines and barbiturates, introduced to him by some of the bad boys in his circle. (Some of them include Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison; the movie is particularly fine at capturing a confusing moment in pop culture, before rock and country definitively went separate ways.)

What John needs is an equal, someone who won’t say yes to him all the time, and he finds his redemption in June Carter (Witherspoon hasn’t been this vibrant in years). She’s a perky princess in a family of country-music royalty; he’s the strange proto-goth with dirt under his fingernails and beer on his breath. Nobody wants them together; even June isn’t sure. But John pursues her over the years, and she is touched by how strenuously he works to make himself worthy of her. Our knowledge that their union lasted 35 years, until her death in 2003 and his death four months later, helps fill in the blanks left by a sometimes too-respectful, son-approved script.

Walk the Line is a sturdily conventional biopic, directed with no special touches by James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted; Cop Land). The concert scenes, with Phoenix and Witherspoon providing their own capable vocals, are just this side of electrifying — Mangold doesn’t have time to let the performances build. We get a triumphant rendition of “Cocaine Blues” at Folsom, but we don’t get his San Quentin appearance, with his legendary reading of “San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell,” which on the live album gets an audience response unlike any other you’ll hear. Walk the Line tames Cash a little, and provides no insight into why he would write a fabled lyric like “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die.” Phoenix’s mercurial performance, less cool than hot-blooded, tells us some of it, and there are moments when you can honestly see how Phoenix’s Cash could age into the towering oak tree who cut 1994’s American Recordings and, at age 62, became a bad-ass for a whole new generation.

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