A nicely romance-coated biopic

Rating: 8/10 (16 July 2006)

To be fair, I never looked forward to seeing this and even less so when I heard that Joaquin Phoenix would substitute ALL of Johnny Cash's singing with his own. And Reese "cookie cluster" Witherspoon would star in it. It all just sounded like the brutal butchery of a rockin' legend to me. But when I saw it a while ago, it blew me and all my negative hype away.
The reason Walk the Line works so much better than most biopics is because its focus is a love story and not the birth of a music legend. Attempts to only portray the latter rarely result in good films for some reason (Ray), but here we have a very sweet and compelling romance at the heart of this film.
While Walk the Line has a chronological approach to the story it tells, the first scene in the film features a Johnny Cash at the height of his career, just about to go on stage. It then zooms in on Cash's childhood as he remembers it and details the events that shaped him into a rock/country legend. The film supposedly stays fairly accurate to the events in the life of the late Johnny Cash but expect one or two scenes with the typical creamy Hollywood coating.
What is amazing is that Reese Witherspoon has shed her cheesecake image and gives a truly Oscar-worthy performance as Cash's love interest June Carter. There are times when Joaquin Phoenix as Cash feels too wooden and stale, but he generally acts with conviction and Johnny Cash was a man of few words so perhaps the man himself also came across as wooden at times. The singing is fantastic and Phoenix brings his own Cash-like voice to the songs.
This is a great film, although not very memorable. 8/10