Joaquin Phoenix plays Cash with a molten excitement entirely missing from Hoffman's portrayal of Capote. The difference between Hoffman's and Phoenix's performances doesn't have to do only with the difference between Capote and Cash; Capote was a turbulent enough character in his own right, God knows. Phoenix is an intelligent actor but unlike Hoffman he's a fully--mesmerizingly--instinctual one, too. When he goes at a song, he uses his jaw like a shovel as if to dig down into himself to express more than the yokel-doggerel lyrics are capable of expressing in themselves. Phoenix can't make lyric art of Cash's songs, but he can make performance art of the moment in which he sings them.

Phoenix couldn't know all that's going on in his face in certain sequences--it can be as eerily changeable as a special effect. (Hoffman always knows.) Phoenix maintains no distance from Cash; we know that the stunted boy's counterproductive rage to become a man is an interpretation, but the actor embodies it as if it were a visitation. Walk the Line is all performance, if it's anything. And it comes close to being nothing--it continually gets in the way of its star with clumsily calculated points that the audience has already absorbed. Considering Phoenix's power as an actor, however, you may be grateful for what you get. (He just keeps getting better, and I though he was already phenomenal when I wrote about him in my review of The Village last year.)

The one thing Walk the Line does absolutely right is to show how different June's approach to performing is from Johnny's--she thinks of herself as a purveyor of conventional entertainment and no more. She's not reaching for anything onstage because she knows real life is lived before and after the show. This is great for Reese Witherspoon as June because it calls for some authoritatively fast, comic shifts at the margin between backstage and onstage. The complementary excitement in Witherspoon's performance comes from seeing June's professional manner flicker on and off; the more genuine emotion she feels, the less expressive she becomes in public. And Phoenix's Johnny is constantly going at her to respond to him, onstage, offstage, no matter where they are, who's watching, or what other demands there may be on them.

Walk the Line didn't make me want to listen to Johnny Cash but to see Phoenix's next movie. (I would also like to see the complete versions of the Johnny-and-June numbers that director James Mangold cuts away from, as if we were more interested in his narrative filmmaking than in seeing the stars whack the songs home.) Capote is all super-intelligent, though partially compromised, text. Hoffman puts himself at the service of the text and that's clearly enough for a lot of people. But when I think about Capote I think about Capote himself, not Hoffman.

Note: Capote doesn't go into Smith's hair-raising description of how the murders resulted from the "frictional interplay" between him and Hickock, as told in In Cold Blood. (This omission may be a let-down to readers of the book after such a big deal is made about what Capote has to do to get the information.) This article from Court TV's Crime Library goes intriguingly further, suggesting that the murders resulted from the dynamics of a homosexual relationship between Hickock and Smith.