It’s a moment of gospel music that occurs not in a church but in a storefront recording studio in Memphis in the mid-1950s.
Hoping to land a record contract, dark-haired, black-clad J.R. Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) sings – drones, really. His band, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, plays guitar and bass with the same flat earnestness.
A young man sits listening, underwhelmed. When famed Sun Records founder Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts) tells the singer he doesn’t believe a word he’s singing, Cash gets his back up quicker than a bobcat coming across a cottonmouth.
“You don’t think I believe in God?” asks Cash, spoiling for a fight.
Thank goodness Phillips stood his ground.
Better yet, Cash had another song, one of a batch he wrote while stationed at an Air Force base in Germany, “Folsom Prison Blues.” It is a pivotal scene in “Walk the Line,” not only because it shows Cash’s craving to make music, but because it reveals the singer’s simmering rage. And it’s one of two moments that linger long after the credits roll for James Mangold’s pulsing valentine to Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, starring Phoenix as the Man in Black and Reese Witherspoon as his rock.
The other scene comes much later, when Cash has gone down, down, down into a ring of fire that has little to do with love and everything to do with addiction.
Wrecked by pills, Cash finds salvation with the aid of June Carter and her parents. What Maybelle (Sandra Ellis Lafferty in a brief, wonderful turn as country music’s godmother), Ezra (Dan Beene) and June do to help Cash battle his demons is as touching a scene about family values as you’re likely to witness this year.
Written by Mangold and Gill Dennis and based on two Cash memoirs, “Walk the Line” recounts Cash’s early years and takes us through the late 1960s. In that span there were tours and hit songs, tours and a drug bust, family and more tours.
While Cash and Carter’s music gives the movie its undeniable soundtrack, it’s their thwarted yet constant tale of friendship and love that makes “Walk the Line” a big-movie pleasure.
Still, the film begins the way one with music as its core value should: with the hard tug of guitar and bass.
It is 1968. As Folsom prison inmates stomp and clap, as his longtime band repeats the boom-chicka chords, Cash gathers himself in the prison’s woodshop, seemingly mesmerized by a buzzsaw. Cash’s older brother Jack died because of a lumber mill accident when Cash was 12.
What happens for the next two hours is a flashback that takes us from Cash’s hardscrabble beginning in Arkansas as the son of an embittered sharecropper, to his ascent into an American music icon.
Throughout that journey, there was June Carter. Before he ever set eyes on her, the daughter of roots-music royalty had staked a place in the young man’s imagination. Carried on the powerful signals of stations such as Nashville’s legendary WSM, June’s voice and those of the Carter clan came through his radio in Arkansas. June’s clan – Mother Maybelle Carter, along with A.P. and Sara Carter – had changed American music in the late ’20s and ’30s as the Carter Family.
When Cash begins traveling in revues with a collection of musicians who will alter it again in the mid-’50s – Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley among them – he meets June. He’s already married. So is she.
When Cash married Vivian Liberto (Ginnifer Goodwin), he merely found a way to mirror and deepen the pain that began in his childhood home. Not burdened enough with his father Ray’s disapproval, John seeks support from a woman who doesn’t honor his dreams either. As played by Ginnifer Goodwin, Vivian isn’t a villain, but even we start to dread going home to her after those rousing shows.
Phoenix and Witherspoon do their own singing. While Phoenix’s upper range doesn’t sound quite as rich, he hits Cash’s deep notes – musically and emotionally. In a performance that should revitalize the sense that she’s worth believing in, Witherspoon comes on all Southern sauciness, then finds more fundamental places to go with June.
If you know about the tribulations of A.P. and Sara’s marriage, you may think June could have been darker from the start. Indeed, Cash-Carter Family experts may find things to complain about. The movie plays fast and loose with the chronology of some of the songs.
But for the forgiving (or clueless) among us, there’s more than enough teasing camaraderie in Johnny and June’s duets and heartfelt drama to keep us content.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
*** | “Walk the Line”
PG-13 for some language, thematic material and depiction of drug dependency|2 hours, 15 minutes|BIOPIC WITH GREAT SONGS|Directed by James Mangold; written by Gill Dennis & Mangold; photography by Phedon Pappamichael; starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick, Dallas Roberts, Dan John Miller, Larry Bagby, Shelby Lynne |Opens today at area theaters.
