Cash biopic gets music, love story right, but short on insight

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, November 17, 2005

Johnny, we hardly knew ye – or so the new film “Walk the Line” hopes. Working firmly in the tradition of the Hollywood music biography, this take on the early life of Johnny Cash is entertaining and tuneful, if rarely insightful.

The towering singer is played by Joaquin Phoenix, the rather stumpy but fittingly intense actor. The movie flashes back to Cash’s childhood, which has the quality of a folk tale, and a traumatic loss that defines his character. (See also “Ray,” which had a weirdly similar incident in the life of Ray Charles.)

After fooling around with a guitar in the military, Cash goes to Memphis at just the moment a hip cat named Sam Phillips is recording young singers by the names of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis at his Sun Records storefront.

The rise to stardom is tracked, with road trips and excess and marriage and fatherhood. At the center of “Walk the Line” is Cash’s rocky courtship of June Carter (Reese Witherspoon). Both happened to be married to other people, but their deep mutual attraction was not to be denied.

Cash’s drug use is part of the rise-and-fall trajectory. The movie leaves off in the late 1960s, when the Man in Black had reached a certain amount of personal redemption.

The film, directed and co-written by James Mangold (“Girl, Interrupted”), is better in spots than in making its overall story fresh. Many of the musical sequences rock, including Cash’s hesitant performance of “I Walk the Line” at Sun. This is the obligatory birth-of-a-sound sequence, with a great moment when Cash desperately looks over his shoulder at his guitarist, hoping for inspiration.

The gritty man-woman stuff between Johnny and June is well-wrought, playing out like a country song with heartache, longing and train whistles in the night. It works because of the commitment of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. The latter, especially, has been doing too many America’s Sweetheart roles, and her fierceness comes out June Carter’s soulfulness and sturdy backbone.

I had a harder time with Phoenix, but maybe it’s because I couldn’t get past the height thing; he doesn’t rise to Cash’s physical stature. But it is a no-holds-barred performance, and Phoenix’s dark looks suggest the burden that Cash carried. He gets Cash’s onstage gyrations down, sometimes to a grotesque degree.

Both actors do their own singing. The publicity states that no digital manipulation was used, but Phoenix’s voice makes a few unlikely swings into a lower register – if it’s all him, great, but it doesn’t sound quite right.

Robert Patrick plays Cash’s stern dad, and singer Shelby Lynne his mother. A few young musicians make nice impressions in supporting roles, including Tyler Hilton as Elvis and especially Waylon Malloy Payne, who’s a hoot as the young rascal Jerry Lee Lewis.

As with “Ray,” the filmmakers spent years developing their project with the cooperation of their subject. I wonder about whether their adoration for their Johnny and June limits the movie, even though “Walk the Line” purports to include warts and all.

Johnny Cash’s mighty talent was contradictory, like a preacher with a hell-raising streak, and the film can’t explain that. The music remains a more eloquent testimonial.