A deaf ear turned to Cash's spiritual journey.

Rating: 7/10 (27 July 2006)

It's rare that I feel a biopic left out too much, but this one definitely made me want more.
In particular, I was disappointed that Cash's spirituality was given such short shrift. I'm not saying I wanted it to be a conversion story with a neat progression from sinner through conversion to saint, but I think the script too pointedly ignored a significant part of Johnny Cash's life story.
The story in the film was certainly well told. I greatly appreciated that they showed how much Cash wasn't a saint, that they highlighted the relationships in his family of origin that contributed to his struggles with painful addictions, that in Cash found a victim, enabler, and instigator his first wife, that his relationship with June Carter had less-than-respectable beginnings.
Johnny Cash was not a perfect human being. That comes through very clearly. But what does not come through as well were the ways in which he was good. In a scene after Johnny's separation from Vivian but before his engagement to June Carter, June tells him that he is a good man. This is something I knew before watching the film, but it is not clear in the film. June's statement is unconvincing based on what we've seen up to that point. In a later scene when Cash is trying to sell the idea of a live concert recording at Fulsom Prison to the record label, the producers object that his audience is made up of "church goers." Really? I mean, yes--I know this because I've known the music of Johnny Cash my whole life, and he's the one musician my mother and I can agree on, but you would never get this from the film--not with the sheer zest and delight Joaquin Phoenix pours into "Cocaine Blues." I don't know any church folks who would have sung along with that one in 1968.
The film has too strong an agenda to ignore the spiritual life of Johnny Cash. One scene in which June practically drags him to a Baptist Church does not cover anywhere near enough territory. Just because we did need to see what a sinner Johnny was doesn't mean we didn't need to see the place God eventually came to have in his life.
He might not have been in AA (was he?), but those steps definitely seem to have happened in his life. He came to believe in a higher power. I wanted to see that and the change it brought to his life.