When I was a young boy, one of the first albums that ever caught my interest was Live at Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash. Along with albums by The Beatles and Elvis Presley that I’d “borrowed” from my parents’ collection, that one spent a lot of time on my turntable. The images in the lyrics were extremely vivid and the songs were mesmerizing. I’ve never been a country music fan, but there was always something about Johnny Cash that made me like him as well as his music. I never knew much about the man behind the music until I saw Walk the Line, the 2005 biopic that attempts to tell the tale of Cash’s rise from a young musician to his recording of Live at Folsom Prison in 1968.
As a boy, John R. Cash lived on a farm with his parents and older brother, Jack. He stayed up late listening to the radio, dreaming of being a musician, while his brother read and did homework. “Why are you so good?”, J.R. asks his brother as it’s apparent that Johnny is viewed as the lesser of the two boys by his father. When Jack is killed in an accident, it’s also apparent that his father wishes that J.R. had been taken and not Jack. After leaving home for a stint in the Air Force, J.R. (Joaquin Phoenix) buys a guitar and starts writing songs. When he returns, he marries Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), a woman he barely knows and starts a family.
After discovering a local recording studio in town, he asks the owner — who happens to be Sam Phillips, the man who first recorded Elvis Presley — how he can get a record deal. Phillips grants an audition and Cash and his band — “two mechanics who can hardly play” — sing a gospel song rather badly. Phillips stops them and asks them if they have anything else that might actually sell. Cash begins singing one of the songs he wrote in the Air Force, “Folsom Prison Blues,” and his band, who don’t know the song, improvise behind him. It gets him a deal and the newly dubbed Johnny Cash begins touring with some of the day’s greatest rock ‘n’ rollers, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and a woman named June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), who would eventually become his second wife.
Walk the Line documents their romance as well as Cash’s struggles with drugs and his stardom. It spends a lot of time and energy making Cash seem like a reckless drug addict hopelessly tormented by the fact that June Carter won’t marry him. Clocking in at two hours and sixteen minutes, the movie could have been tightened up with fewer scenes of Cash as a drunk or lying in a pool of sweat. I’m not asking the movie to sidestep the fact that Cash was addicted to drugs and alcohol, it just could have been handled in a less ham-fisted manner. That said, the performances are wonderfully nuanced. Witherspoon, especially, is a delight as the tough but vulnerable June Carter. The songs, which are actually sung by Witherspoon and Phoenix, are well-done and never boring.
My main problem with Walk the Line isn’t the performances or the songs. After the film, I came away not really getting a sense of why Cash is the legend that he is today. The movie paints him as a drugged-out, lovesick rock star who somehow managed to not lose everything he had when he was down. Cash was much more than that and it’s a shame that the movie doesn’t give him the credit for being more than just another near-tragedy. He deserves better, but this is still a decent film. Wait for the DVD.
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
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