If you don't like the music, there's not much else for you.

Rating: 6/10 (23 March 2016)

For the most part, I enjoyed Walk the Line. It was very entertaining, but it has its flaws. It really is a pretty cliché story, it shows the ups and downs in a man's career, nothing you haven't seen before. It shows his rise to frame, his introduction to drugs, his fall, his rising back up, and getting the girl in the end. We've seen this before in better movies. Not to say that it doesn't have redeeming qualities, though. If you enjoy Johnny Cash's music(and the popular music of that time), you'll love the music of this film. As a lover of all music I very much enjoyed the soundtrack, and all the musical performances are all very good. I had heard so many good things about the musical performances before seeing the movie but I always assumed that it was just digitally enhanced to sound good. After listening to the commentary of this film, I discovered that the director, James Mangold(a director I more or less respect), didn't want to have anything like that, because this is a film about people who wouldn't have any of that in their own music, even if their vocals were a little off, as long as it portrayed the emotion and message of their music, they sold it; so doing what these artists despised would really be incompetent of him. Also, Joaquin Phoenix's performance(not musically, just acting) was spectacular. A specific scene on stage is a shining example of not only this, but the direction as well, is one on stage with Cash on drugs. The performance, combined with the direction and camera-work made the best scene in the film. All-in-all, it is a very cliché film sprinkled with some great things, it's not all bad, yet not great, either.