The line between mediocrity and greatness

Movies based on the lives of popular musicians constitute a durable genre in Hollywood, and also a fairly safe one. While not many of them rise to the level of greatness -- Coal Miner's Daughter, Michael Apted's life of Loretta Lynn, comes closer than most -- there are very few that manage to be completely unwatchable, though De-Lovely certainly tried.

Walk the Line, James Mangold's movie about Johnny Cash, settles down in the fat middle of the bell curve, providing, if nothing else, an excuse to go out and buy some CD's. Well cast, competently written (by Mangold and Gill Dennis) and carefully costumed, it adheres to a familiar "Behind the Music" formula, following its subject through childhood trauma, marriage and divorce, alter-nating off-stage melodrama with recreated performances that remind us why we should care about this guy in the first place.

Comparisons with Taylor Hackford's Ray, which opened around this time last year, are inevitable. Both pictures place on the shoulders of their relatively young stars -- Jamie Foxx and, in this case, Joaquin Phoenix -- the burden of impersonating characters whose real voices, faces and mannerisms could hardly be better known. (For good measure, Walk the Line also gives us brief glimpses of actors playing Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings and Jerry Lee Lewis.)

There are, moreover, some striking biographical similarities between Johnny Cash and Ray Charles, both of whom worked with the filmmakers telling their stories, though neither lived to see the final product. Like Ray, Walk the Line tells the tale of a poor Southerner, born in the early years of the Great Depression, whose childhood was marked by the death of a beloved brother. Between the humble beginnings and the eventual immortality come events that seem almost interchangeable, more like stock situations than lived experiences. Vintage tour buses rumble down nighttime back roads. Drug habits are acquired -- heroin for Charles, prescription pills for Cash -- leading to trouble with the law and painful scenes of withdrawal. The houses and the record labels get bigger (Charles moved from Atlantic to ABC, Cash from Sun to Columbia), the groupies come and go, and the long-suffering wives and girlfriends occasionally burst into angry tears.

The crucial difference, and the main reason that Walk the Line proves to be the lesser film, lies in the way the movies deal with the music that is, after all, their reason for existing. Hackford structured his film around Ray Charles' creative life, inviting us to understand how he fused various elements of the American musical vernacular into a new and distinctive sound. While Johnny Cash achieved something comparable, Mangold's film offers more tribute than insight. As he leaves home for the Air Force, Johnny's mother (Shelby Lynne) presses her book of hymns into his hands, and before long we see him, while stationed in Germany, working on what will become Folsom Prison Blues. (Later, June Carter makes notes for Ring of Fire, though in the film's chronology she appears to be doing so several years after the song was first recorded.)

When Cash and his combo audition at Sun Records, Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts) stops them in the middle of a pallid gospel tune and harangues Cash about the importance of honest, raw emotion, advice that elicits Folsom Prison Blues and a recording contract. The most popular version of this story is a lot punchier than what is on screen. "Go home and sin," Phillips is supposed to have said, "and then come back with a song I can sell."