Don't 'Walk the Line' if you can avoid it

Just past the midway point of the Johnny Cash biopic, "Walk the Line," Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) performs Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe" on a stage in Las Vegas. For anyone remotely familiar with the tune, Phoenix's rendition is strikingly unfaithful, reinterpreting Dylan's bitter kiss-off as a jaunty, country-pop duet. Unfortunately, "strikingly unfaithful" also seems to describe the film as a whole; director James Mangold has reinterpreted a rough, dangerous life's story into a slick, processed Hollywood production.

A biopic on Cash, an icon in contemporary country and American pop culture, was long overdue. His country roots gave his words a weary honesty that, combined with a defiant rock 'n' roll spirit, created a unique style that continues to resonate today. The legacy of Cash's outlaw spirit and take-no-prisoners attitude has penetrated across genres, including rock, punk and even industrial groups. America's music culture has ached for a rich Cash biopic. Unfortunately, "Walk the Line," which chronicles his life from his rural Arkansaw childhood to his 1968 marriage to fellow country singer June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), does not deliver.

Despite the natural rough edges that characterize Cash's real life story, Mangold presents his life as a cookie cutter rise-and-fall-story. Like some legend from the Old West, Cash's story deserves to be written on dusty, yellowed parchment with frayed edges; here, Mangold has printed it on glossy, high-contrast paper. To be fair, the film does deal with Cash's marital problems and drug addiction, but it feels strangely artificial, as if it were forced into the film to preserve some historical integrity.

Like many biopics, "Walk the Line" attempts so much that, by the end, it has accomplished very little. The motto of the first half of the film might as well be "do everything, quickly." The events of Cash's life are pitched in such a compressed form that any emotional significance is diluted and important characters are lost in the frenzy. There is even the typical "becoming a star" montage, in which brief shots of cars mobbed by screaming fans, sold-out performances and backstage encounters with groupies hurtle by on the screen. This sort of uninspired storytelling gives much of the film a dragging, insipid feel.

The film doesn't hit its stride until about 90 minutes in, when Cash's career progression is put on hiatus and the love story of Cash and Carter begins to dominate the action. The genuine spark between the two characters animates an otherwise lifeless story; Johnny and June's arc from admiration, to friendship, to repressed attraction and finally to love rings sincere and makes for engaging cinema.

Phoenix nails Cash's mannerisms, from the crooked shapes his mouth makes when singing to the distinctive way in which he holds his guitar, as if he were trying to climb over it. As Carter, Witherspoon brings sass and sangfroid to a role that easily might have degenerated into silly perkiness in the hands of a lesser actress. Yet even their electric performances cannot mask the film's greatest shortcoming. After 135 minutes, we might know a little more about how Johnny met June, but no more about how Cash came to be such an important figure to so many people — and that's the story that we really paid to see.

Advance press for the film emphasized its groundings in primary source material. Phoenix and Mangold were said to have visited the Cashes before their death in 2003 to discuss their wishes for the tone and content of the film, and the film purports to be based on two Cash autobiographies. However, like so many other biopics with unlimited ambitions and bottomless budgets, "Walk the Line" gets the facts right but fails to inject enough imagination and passion.