Film

Walk the Line (2005)

Director: James Mangold

Movie review

From Time Out London

Johnny Cash is the latest American musician to receive the Hollywood hagio-pic treatment, and director James Mangold (‘Copland’, ‘Girl, Interrupted’) offers a straightforward, often thrilling account of the country singer’s early career and tempestuous courtship of his future wife, June Carter. But it’s hardly a daring take on Cash’s life: Mangold doesn’t stray from the familiar model of an artist’s self-destruction followed by redemption by way of God and a good woman, swiftly pulling down the curtain in 1968 when he reaches Cash’s new-found sobriety and marriage to Carter. As such, we leave the singer on a high, free of both his earlier demons and the later vagaries of his career as a TV star, evangelical icon and friend of Nixon and Billy Graham.

After some pedestrian sign-posting scenes recounting Cash’s upbringing in rural Arkansas and the accidental death of his older brother, we race speedily and with vigour through his early career, when he was always on the road, knocking back pep pills and watching his first marriage to a childhood sweetheart disintegrate along the way. It’s an eventful ride but Mangold gives himself little room to investigate Cash intimately. The film’s saving graces are its treatment of gigs and the performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. The live scenes are electric, with Phoenix and Witherspoon – who sing themselves – pulling out the stops to recreate both the energy of the shows and the ambiguity of Cash and Carter’s relationship as they toured together for years while still married to other people. Thankfully, the music wins out, offering a fitting tribute to Cash’s art, if not the science of biography.

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