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He sang gospel songs, but he also wrote darker tunes like the one in which he assumed the persona of a man who shot someone "just to watch him die." He was a country star who found his greatest success after he teamed up with a producer of rap albums. He produced a haunting music video shortly before his death at 70 that offered a stark, unflinching look at human mortality, yet he had—and continues to have—many fans many years his junior.

Joaquin Phoenix plays the Man in Black

Johnny Cash was a man of contradictions, and Joaquin Phoenix—who plays the Man in Black in Walk the Line, a film developed with Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter Cash prior to their deaths in 2003, and overseen since then by their son John—had a chance to see those contradictions up close, when he accepted a dinner invitation from the Cash family.

"Usually when you get invited to something like that, you show up and it's, like, a table of 20 people, and there's a lot of forks, and you don't know which one to use," says Phoenix, whose film opens this Friday, as he chats with a gaggle of reporters in Los Angeles. "But it wasn't like that at all. There were about six to eight people, and it was all family. And John and June were just wonderful and unpretentious and welcoming."

After dinner, everyone migrated to the living room, and Cash picked up a guitar and began to strum. "He'd been strumming for a while and then he leaned over and said, 'I'm waiting for June to get my nerve up.' I was like, 'You're waiting for June to get your nerve up? That's so odd. I can't believe Johnny Cash is nervous.' And then she comes in, and he says, 'Will you sing a song with me?' And she says, 'Yeah.' And so they started singing a song."

The song was "The Far Side Banks of Jordan," and Phoenix says he was amazed by the "profound sense of love" he witnessed between the Cashes. "And then, moments later, he quoted to me my most sadistic dialogue from Gladiator, saying it was his favorite part of the movie." (The line: "Your son squealed like a girl when they nailed him to the cross. And your wife moaned like a whore when they ravaged her again and again.")

Phoenix says the experience encapsulated the two separate forces that lived within Cash: "It really is night and day. You wouldn't believe it unless you saw it. And he seemed to relish that dialogue as much as he relished looking into June's eyes and singing this song."

Apart from some scenes set during Cash's childhood in the 1940s, Walk the Line begins in the 1950s, when Cash played alongside Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun Records in Memphis and on tour across the country. The film alludes to the tension between sacred and secular music at that time—a tension that is still very real to some of the film's cast.

Waylon Payne as Jerry Lee Lewis

Waylon Payne, the son of country singer Sammi Smith and guitarist Jody Payne and now a country musician in his own right, plays Jerry Lee Lewis in the film. And just as Jerry Lee faced opposition from conservative Christians, including his cousin Jimmy Swaggart, so too Payne was discouraged from taking part in the music industry by his relatives.

"I was raised by my aunt and uncle in a town in Texas that was kind of small," he says. "They were pretty devout Christians, and so music was kind of discouraged, because my Ma ran around with a bunch of thugs, and that wasn't very good. So I was originally destined, I guess, to be a—oh Lord God help me—a Southern Baptist minister."

Payne attended Oklahoma Baptist University for a couple years, but was expelled "because I wasn't quite a Christian." And he says he identified with the notoriously wild Jerry Lee because he had dealt with drugs and alcohol some years ago in his own life.

"I say this without the knowledge of knowing exactly what it was he went through," says Payne, "but the only thing I could compare it to was the struggles that I dealt with when it was really obvious to me that there was a play going on in my mind about, well, do you serve God or do you serve yourself, or what do you do? And I kind of drew the conclusion that I am a man, first and foremost, who is going to fail, and is going to fall; but if I lay down, then that's probably a sin of giving up. So I just keep getting up and try to find serenity and peace in every day."

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Walk the Line	Printer view