Walk the Line

Last night my wife and I actually got to see a first-run movie! Hee-hah! We decided to see the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. I love musician biopics. They give musicians like me hope that someone might remember our music, even if us wannabes don’t have the talent to create anything that will really last.

If you aren’t familiar with Cash’s genious for songwriting, Walk the Line will provide a taste of why he is such an icon. You can’t beat lyrics like this, from Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”:

When I was just a baby,
My Mama told me, “Son,
Always be a good boy,
Don’t ever play with guns,”
But I shot a man in Reno,
Just to watch him die,
When I hear that whistle blowin’,
I hang my head and cry.

Add Cash’s rumbling bass voice and some slapback Telecaster guitar to the mix, and you have a song that that speaks to people’s souls. “Walk the Line” brilliantly shows how Cash the songwriter and performer, along with his eventual wife June Carter, bottled this sort of magic.

The film doesn’t shy away from Cash’s struggles with drug addiction or his infedility to his first wife, nor does it glamorize them. It’s refreshing to see a film acknowledge that drug and alcohol abuse, and sexual infidelity, have life-destroying consquences.

In real life, Cash never fully overcame these demons, but he did find redemption through his faith in Christ (see this CT article for more on Cash’s faith). And this is where the film is most disappointing. In typical Hollywood fashion, the Cash we see on screen finds redemption through “believing in himself” and through romantic love.

For example, the film portrays Cash’s audition for Sun Records owner Sam Phillips, which Cash began by singing gospel tunes. Phillips wasn’t interested in the gospel tunes, which were derivative and commercially unappealing, but Cash persisted, pulled out “Folsom Prison Blues,” and Phillips perceived the spark of genious. This is a true story, but in the film it’s embellished with a contemporary pop psychology platitude uttered by Phillips: “it’s not about believing in God,” he tells Cash, after rejecting the gospel tunes, “it’s about believing in yourself.” I doubt the real Johnny Cash would agree. I think the real Johnny Cash would be the first to say that his ability to accept himself, and to truly love, followed the redemption he found in Christ.

The film’s other great cliche is that romantic love conquers all, and justifies everything. Cash was married with four children when he fell for June Carter, and Carter was married with children as well. To the film’s credit, it shows Carter resisting Cash’s advances early on their relationship. It seems that, in real life, Cash and Carter eventually developed a solid marriage. Yet, the film seems a bit too dismissive of Cash’s first wife, as though the love Cash and Carter eventually come to share washes away the sins of infidelity and divorce. Again, I think the real Johnny Cash would be the first to say that his earlier conduct was not made acceptable by the love he eventually found with Carter.

“Walk the Line,” then, is fascinating for its moments of stark honesty, its window on an important time in contemporary music history, and its grafting of our cultural worldview’s mixture of self-reliance and romantic love onto a story of true redemption.