Much like 2004's Ray, which featured an Oscar-winning performance from Jamie Foxx, Walk the Line centers around a musical trailblazer who had to fight off personal demons during the course of a long and illustrious career. Both Ray Charles and Johnny Cash had to overcome early childhood tragedies involving a sibling, drug addictions and skeptics of their style of music.
But Walk the Line isn't merely a biopic that focuses on the full career path of Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) – although it does hit on a number of the highlights and lowlights in his early years. It becomes clear once the story introduces June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) that we're also dealing with a love story – and a pretty good one at that.
Cash's formative years in near poverty in rural Arkansas were spent working in the fields with his parents and older brother, occasionally fishing and listening to country and gospel music on the radio, featuring little June Carter, among others. At this point, a music career was merely a pipe dream for Cash, who would eventually leave home to join the Air Force, writing music in his free time.
After leaving the service, he marries and gets a job, but jumps at the opportunity to audition for Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts) of Sun Records. Initially, the audition is going badly, leading to a great speech from Phillips that seems to awaken something in Cash. In this scene, the musical career of Johnny Cash is born.
Taking to the road performing at shows along with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and some guy named Elvis Presley, Cash begins to find his signature sound that will serve him for the next 40-plus years. Even those who aren't big Johnny Cash fans can recognize a song of his when they hear it.
It's at one of those shows that Johnny literally runs into June backstage and is instantly in love, even as she's effortlessly making comical banter with the onstage announcer to stall her pending performance. June later explains that she learned to be a good comedian, because she knew she could always fall back on that if the singing career didn't pan out.
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