Written by Fantasma el Rey

Walk The Line is more than the tale of true love and finding the one person who can save you, mostly from yourself, it’s the story of a young man on his way to becoming a legend. Johnny Cash and June Carter’s love for one another is now a well-known fact and for most folks this film brought that home while continuing to spread the music of an American original. The extended cut of Walk The Line adds about twenty minutes to the original release and moves well, shedding a bit more light on the young man in black. The film covers Johnny’s childhood in Dyess, Arkansas up to just after his legendary concert at Folsom prison. The additional scenes make the film more of a bio pic than a chic flick about said love and romance.

With these added scenes young Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) appears less pathetic. At times in the original he came across as some jerk with an obsession over Miss June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), kind of creepy. We get to see that some of Johnny’s moves were more calculated. Case in point the scene where John and June “bump” into each other at the awards show. In the theatrical version it looks like a random thing. Here, we find that it was Johnny’s doing that put them so close. Well, okay, he looks even creepier now I guess, but calculated, giving a better sense of the man. As it stands now we see that June probably stopped accepting his calls and without this meeting they may have never gotten back on the road.

Johnny seems more like a kid finding his way and getting lost for a while in a sea of pills and booze. The extended cut puts back more scenes of Johnny, making him more of the focus, yet losing none of the importance of June’s role in his life. We also see that music really was his life. The first cut made music appear to be merely a distraction from the absence of June. Even though many of his forlorn love tunes were written with her in mind, we now get to see him working on “I Still Miss Someone” while falling down the same hole fallen into by Hank Williams Sr. Bringing up another point that most folks forget, the fact that the Carter family saw Hank self-destruct practically in front of them. June was a little girl at the time and must have been deeply impacted by Hank’s fall. With that fact known, it’s clear that June alongside Ma and Pop Carter seized the chance to save this young man with an amazing, deep voice and gift for telling stories through his songs.