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Cash biopic walks a familiar line

Flattering and formulaic, Walk the Line misses the opportunity to show us the gritty edges of the singer we thought we knew.

Take another look at Mark Romanek's music video for Hurt to begin understanding why the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line is disappointing. The video is an emotionally crushing piece of work featuring the singer going one last round with his personal demons, confessing guilt yet stopping short of apology.

Its edginess matches Cash's hell-raising days, without a single image conveyed as viewers might expect for someone we think we know so well. It's an unconventional, unflattering eulogy for a towering life almost wasted.

Walk the Line, however, is flattering and conventional to a fault. We've seen this template before, in biographies of musicians from Buddy Holly to Ray Charles: Someone with a gift struggles to refine it, deals with personal problems and triumphs in the last reel. Director James Mangold doesn't have a single provocative idea in mind. Walk the Line could be a Country Music Television movie of the week and nobody would notice.

Ray had the same problems last year, but also had the advantage of a magnificent channeling of Charles by Jamie Foxx, who won an Oscar. Walk the Line has Joaquin Phoenix imitating Cash's mannerisms and voice, but you could find that in Las Vegas or Nashville revues. It's a terrible injustice that Foxx - who can sound exactly like Charles, as he has proved in TV appearances - was made to lip-synch songs while Phoenix does his own vocals and can't convincingly imitate Cash.

Each time Phoenix opens his mouth to sing, the movie's believability drops. He's obviously straining to lower his voice to Cash's baritone, and his "r's" aren't the Southern kind, but something more Midwestern. Lip-syncing might have rescued Walk the Line, and certainly would be more satisfying to Cash's fans.

What Walk the Line has in its favor is a terrific performance by Reese Witherspoon as Cash's future wife, June Carter. She doesn't look or sound much like the late singer; Carter had a harder, homegrown appearance and a voice like a dinner bell, while Witherspoon's tinkles. But Witherspoon nails the character's spunk, her unblinking righteousness that Cash knew was exactly what he needed.

The film's resemblance to other biographies, especially Ray, is obvious from the start, when Cash, like Charles, suffers a childhood trauma, the accidental death of a sibling. Then comes the haunting, almost penitent aftereffects: Charles' blindness and, in this case, Cash's father (Robert Patrick) turning grief into resentment of his surviving son. A hitch in the Army is an escape, and the purchase of a cheap guitar is therapy that turns into a career.

Meeting Carter on the way up leads to Cash's divorce, while he makes gentlemanly advances to an unhappily married woman. The pressures of fame lead to amphetamine addiction, alcoholism and a brief jail term. Cash's sound gets more refined and revolutionary, his image as an outlaw expands, and Carter finally gives in but never gives up trying to save her man. Crises appear and are solved in abrupt fashion, like a song needlessly changing tempos. The love story subtext of Walk the Line is nicely defined and should have taken precedence over the standard star-is-born cliches.

For every scene that rises to its subject - the famed Folsom Prison concert despite Phoenix's singing, for example - another sinks into caricature and convention. Cash brushes against other music legends such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, the former pigeonholed as someone who likes chili fries and the latter merely a preener. Nothing in Walk the Line is as special as Cash worshipers will probably convince themselves it is.

- Steve Persall can be reached at 727 893-8365 or persall@sptimes.com His blog is at www.sptimes.com/blogs/film

Grade: C+

Director: James Mangold

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick, Dallas Roberts, Waylon Payne, Tyler Hilton

Screenplay: James Mangold, Gill Dennis, based on the autobiographies The Man in Black and Cash: An Autobiography

Rating: PG-13; profanity, mature themes including drug addiction

Running time: 136 min.