Movie Review: Walk The Line

James Mangold's 'Walk the Line' with its fantastic performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, is a biopic of Johnny Cash. Here was a man who was blamed by his hard-drinking father for the death of his older brother, who said God "took the wrong son," who looked at Johnny's big new house and all he could say was, "Jack Benny's is bigger." In the movie you sense that the drive behind a Johnny Cash song was defiance. He was going to sing it no matter what anybody thought, especially his father.

The movie shows John R. Cash inventing himself. He came from a hard-working Arkansas family and grew up listening to country music on the radio, especially the Carter Family. He wrote his first song while he was serving in the Air Force in Germany. When he came back to the States, he got married and got a regular job but dreamed about being a recording artist. When his first wife, Vivian, complained he was spending more time on music than on her, he referred to his "band" and she said, "your band is two mechanics who can't even hardly play."

She was just about right. When they finally got the legendary Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts) of Sun Records in Memphis to let them audition, they sounded like carbon copies of third-rate radio gospel singers. Sam should have shown them the door. Out of kindness he asked John if he had anything of his own he wanted to play. Cash chose a song he wrote in Germany, "Folsom Prison Blues." One of the key passages in Phoenix's performance comes as he learns, while in the process of singing this song, how he should sound and who he should be. You can hear his musicians picking up the tempo to keep pace with him. He starts the song as a loser and ends as Johnny Cash.

'Walk the Line' follows the story arc of many other musical biopics, maybe because many careers are the same: hard times, obscurity, success, stardom, too much money, romantic adventures, drugs or booze, and then (if they survive) beating the addiction, finding love and reaching a more lasting stardom. That more or less describes the movie, but every time we see this story the characters change and so does the music, and that makes it new.

What adds boundless energy to 'Walk the Line' is the performance by Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash. We're told in the movie that June learned to be funny onstage because she didn't think she had a good voice; by the time John meets her she's been a pro since the age of 4, and effortlessly moves back and forth between her goofy onstage persona and her real personality, which is sane and thoughtful, despite her knack for hitching up with the wrong men. Johnny Cash for that matter seems like the wrong man, and she holds him at arm's length for years, first because he's a married man, and later because he has a problem with booze and pills.

The film's most harrowing scene shows Johnny onstage after an overdose, his face distorted by pain and anger, looking almost satanic before he collapses. What is most fearsome is not even his collapse, but the force of his will, which makes him try to perform when he is clearly unable to. You would not want to get in the way of that determination. When Cash is finally busted and spends some time in jail, his father says "now you won't have to work so hard to make people think you been to jail."

Although Cash's father (played by Robert Patrick) eventually does sober up, the family that saves him is June's. The Carter Family were country royalty ever since the days of their broadcasts from a high-powered pirate station across the river from Del Rio, Texas. When they take a chance on Cash, they all take the chance, watch her parents as they greet Johnny's favorite pill-pusher.

It is by now well known that Phoenix and Witherspoon performed their own vocals in the movie. And what vocals, well they inspired this guy to buy the soundtrack from iTunes.

Walk The Line Movie Trailer