During his misspent youth, Johnny Cash crashed and burned so spectacularly, so frequently, that a future rock biopic became something of a certainty. James Mangold’s fine film has plenty of seamy detail – Cash’s amphetamine fuelled tours with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, hysterical groupies, a drug-bust at the Mexican border. Primarily though, Walk The Line is a romance, a dark, spiritual, difficult, redemptive love story.
Focusing episodically on the years between 1958 and 1968, Mr. Mangold’s screenplay retraces Cash’s journey into mythology. With echoes of last year’s Ray, the film begins with a childhood tragedy. Growing up in an impoverished sharecropper’s colony in Arkansas, Johnny becomes traumatised and guilt-ridden when he loses his older brother Jack in a sawmill accident. Later, on an airforce base in Germany, he plucks out the chords for ‘I Walk the Line’. Returning home, he marries teenage sweetheart Vivian, but his obsessive drive to create music clashes with her cosy bourgeois aspirations. He dresses all in black to audition for Sun Records impresario Sam Philips, cuts his first record on the spot and heads out on tour, a non-stop riot of floozies and Benzedrine. This, however, is a story of salvation with June Carter as road from the wilderness, Jesus and the Promised Land as rolled into one sassy package.
From the outset, it is as if Cash’s happiness is determined by her proximity to him. As a child he listens to a ten year-old June sing angelically from the radio. When they meet on a Sun Records showcase tour, it’s a fait accompli. But not right away. Married to other people, full of contradictory, self-destructive impulses and overwhelmed by one another, theirs is a convoluted courtship.
When June observes that Johnny’s sound – “is steady as a train, sharp as a razor,” she might easily be describing Walk The Line. Mangold’s forensic profiling of his protagonists isn’t going for quick buck crowd-pleasing. Intense and interior, there are moments when the film could be A Coalminer’s Daughter, regendered and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Cash’s drug abuse and eventual rehabilitation is never simply physical. It’s a sickness of the soul. That Joaquin Phoenix’s melancholic performance as the Man In Black manages to convey as much is remarkable. That he sings Cash’s songs credibly is doubly so. Likewise, co-star Reese Witherspoon, (who also did her own singing) who blazes up the screen as June, all lightness and wit and tempestuousness.
A complex and fittingly rocking memorial.