I went to see Walk the Line with Kristi (AKA Cassie Banning, AKA G33kgod33ss, AKA Avindair’s SpouselUnit) yesterday.

     Other than the fact that I managed to sit next to the one man in the world who seems to have no clue about the intersections between movie and cell phone etiquette, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

     Had I recently watched a lot of behind-the-music documentaries, or had we recently been afflicted with a raft of biographical movies, I don’t think it would have been as much fun.

     Johnny Cash may have been the Original Bad Boy of Rock and Roll, but I think the shine has been kind of taken off of that role over the decades with the carefully scripted and publicized “melt-downs” of our bad-boy stars being very rote and tired, as well as obviously contrived.

     You can almost imagine a would-be entertainer, meeting their publicist for the first time.

 Publicist :  “Hello, I am the engineer of  your soon-to-be-tortured soul.”

     W-BE:  “…uh…you're going to torture my soul?”

Publicist:   “No, no no…I’m going to make it LOOK tortured.  How else are we going to convince people that you’re a real artist?”

    W-BE:    “Well, I actually have a few things that haunt my conscience and drive me to try to create…”

Publicist:     “Yeah, that’s great.  I did the research.  Sorry, your demons aren’t sexy enough.  Don’t worry, we’ll get you some new ones.  Wait!  Do you think you might have some repressed memories?  No wait, those aren’t sexy anymore.  Look, don’t worry, I’ll work on it and get back to you.”

     But back to the movie.  Joaquin Phoenix absolutely disappeared into Johnny Cash.  He just naturally produced the signature side-ways grin, his voice, when he said “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” just resonated on exactly the same note.  There was never a moment when I became aware that this was someone else acting like Johnny Cash.  Wonderful job.

     This was the first movie where Reese Witherspoon really convinced me (although I may be doing her an injustice, as I haven’t seen a lot of her movies.)  Every once in a while she broke the bubble a little, but even then all I thought was “She’s having a blast with this role.”  So it was alright.

     Unlike a lot of these movies, though, Walk the Line focused on the story, and let it unfold.  It didn’t try to grab us, it didn’t try to shock us, it didn’t try to make Johnny look larger than life.

     What it did do was put his flaws and virtues out in the open where anyone could see them and showed us a human being and the story of his life.

     It was human, compelling, and a great story well told.