Joaquin Phoenix Walks the Line

Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line.

The main impression one takes away from the new movie Walk The Line is that Johnny Cash was an American original the likes of which we shall not see again. Born and raised in rural Arkansas—he grew up near and was actually an acquaintance of another great American original, Bear Bryant—Cash was one of the first musicians, and perhaps the last one too, to straddle the line between natural country-folk artist and self-conscious pop star. (His meeting and subsequent friendship with Bob Dylan helped transform both country and rock.)

Walk The Line is a tale of white man’s blues, roughly the Caucasian equivalent of Ray, the Ray Charles bio that was released in 2004. Like that film, it features a terrific, dead-on portrayal of an American musical icon from a completely unexpected source. Like Jamie Foxx, Joaquin Phoenix might have been the last person you would consider casting in this role, but Phoenix not only impersonates Cash, he gets inside him, not only the man’s essential sadness but his stoic resilience. He even gives a good approximation of Cash’s onstage performances, a big plus in this kind movie, as anyone who remembers the unsettling insertion of Patsy Cline’s vocals into the mouth of Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams (1985) can attest.

It isn’t Phoenix’s fault that Walk The Line isn’t a great movie, though his performance is much of the reason that it is a very good one. The director, James Mangold (coauthor of the script with Gill Dennis), had a big hit a few years ago with Girl, Interrupted, an oversimplified story of emotional illness that was redeemed by a breathtakingly ferocious performance from Angelina Jolie, who was allowed to enter the movie from a side door and then take it over. Walk The Line has two fine actors, not only Phoenix but also Reese Witherspoon, as Cash’s wife, June Carter, who was a great country artist in her own right and heir to the tradition of the Carter Family, the royalty of American country music. But the script has no Jolie-like character in it to give it intensity or emotional resonance.

Essentially it’s a story of a man who is tortured by his personal demons and can only work them out through his music, a natural roustabout who is redeemed, and just barely, by the love of a good woman (and Reese Witherspoon, dressed up in this movie in a gorgeous mane of brunette hair, is every man’s idea of a good woman). At times their relationship is so touching it hints at the richness of the last part of Lee Smith’s great novel about the beginnings of country music, The Devil’s Dream, which contains thinly disguised portraits of Cash and Carter.

But surely, one feels, Cash’s and Carter’s lives must have been more complicated than this movie allows. At times the characters’ emotions seem so primary that it has the feel of a memoir filmed with one or both of the subjects standing over the director’s shoulder cautioning him to remove anything that might be too personal or too offensive. But then, considering how many members of both families (to say nothing of millions of devoted fans) Mangold had to please, it’s a triumph that the film got made at all.

Great movies about country-music icons are almost as rare as great country songs that don’t mention trains, alcohol, mother, or love gone wrong. Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), with Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones and an unbeatable up-from-poverty story line, is probably the best. Jessica Lange and Ed Harris redeemed Sweet Dreams (though Beverly D’Angelo in Coal Miner’s Daughter was the better Patsy Cline). The grandfather of country music, Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, has never been the subject of a feature film, though he rode the rails as a hobo, palled around with black musicians, and died young of tuberculosis in a New York hotel. George Hamilton was a terrific Hank Williams in an insipid film, Your Cheatin’ Heart (1964).

A Hollywood biographical film is almost by definition a gloss on an artist’s life, but making a movie about the life of a country artist, with fans who believe in their idol’s virtues with a near-religious fervor, is almost impossible. It’s no accident that the greatest film about country music, an obscure 1972 movie called Payday, was about a fictitious country singer and was made for an art-house audience. (Directed by Daryl Duke, it featured Rip Torn in a bravura performance as a self-destructive composite of Hank Williams, George Jones, and Johnny Cash, among others.)

Walk The Line is compromised by the nature of its target audience—its title has an unintended irony—and subject matter, but for all that, its pleasures are as clear and substantial as the best of the music it is about.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.