I have an admitted great deal of difficulty with biopics about musicians and artists. I remember waiting with bated breath to see Pollock because it had been getting rave reviews and all my art teachers kept telling me that Ed Harris had been learning for ten years how to paint like Pollock in order to nail the physicality of action painting and blah blah blah. I also remember being significantly underwhelmed by the film; it wasn’t a movie about a painter, it was a movie about an abusive alcoholic. So although I’ve been omgsoexcited for this film despite being consistently thwarted in trying to see it, I still harboured the same sort of fear: that it would be a film about someone who likes to get drunk and trash his guitar, rather than being about a man and his music.
But I was so, so, so relieved when I realised Walk The Line was the latter. My measure of how good a biopic is depends on how desperately I want to run out and submerge myself in the subject’s work, be it music or painting or anything else. Pollock didn’t make me want to run out to an art gallery. Walk The Line makes me want to buy every last Johnny Cash album ever made.
Sam Philips probably summed it up best in his little bit in the film: play the music you would choose to sing if you were dying and were only allowed to be remembered for one song, that it’s not about your faith in God or something else, that it’s about your faith in yourself and your music. Melodramatic, slightly heavy handed, and a little obvious? Perhaps, but it’s also true. I remember watching a Ewan McGregor interview done during the filming of Moulin Rouge and he said how we hear the words in music on a different emotional level than we do on paper; Philips sounds like a cheesehead saying those words, but the germ of what he’s saying becomes incredibly evident in the film itself when it’s expressed through the music and the performances. They made me want to love the music, made me want to hear more, and that’s exactly what it should have done.
As a side note, I had a little squee at the Bob Dylan content. I loved how he was all “Hey, you should listen to this new kid, Bob Dylan” and then when the slide whistle on “Highway 61 Revisted” came out of nowhere, Audrey and I sort of died a little. Using “It Ain’t Me Babe” to further the biography through the music was a nice touch too. [Cash and Dylan dueted on a remake of Dylan's "Girl From The North Country" on Dylan's 1969 album Nashville Skyline, although the timeline in the film ended before that point.]