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Cash had his own battles to wage against drug addiction, and to the extent that he succeeded, it was largely due to the influence of June Carter and her extended family, who, in one amusing scene, stand guard outside his house with rifles to scare the dealers away.

Reese Witherspoon in the role of June Carter Cash

Reese Witherspoon, who plays June in the film, says the Carters were motivated by their faith—an element she admits may be lacking in the movie. "I think June Carter brought a lot of Christianity into [Cash's] life, and encouraged him to go to church, and to find God," she says. "I think spirituality had a lot to do with him getting off drugs. I don't think it's in the movie as much, but I gather that that had a lot to do—more to do—with it."

Witherspoon says faith is a part of her life, too: "Definitely. I was raised going to church every Sunday, and I go to church most Sundays with my kids … For me, where I'm at in my career, so many people want to put you in a place that you're not real, and treat you like you're not real. For me it's a great experience of grounding, and I stand next to people who have nothing and who have everything, and we all treat each other the same, because we all are the same. It's just like a little weekly reminder. So that's helpful to me, actually."

Writer-director James Mangold, who directed Angelina Jolie to an Oscar in Girl, Interrupted and is hearing Oscar buzz again for Walk the Line, concedes that the film does not play up the religious side of Cash's career very much—though he says that is because the film covers only the first two decades of Cash's adult life, from when he was writing songs on an Air Force base in Germany in the early 1950s to his marriage to June in 1968. (It was in the 1970s that Cash became very overt about his faith, hanging out with Billy Graham, sharing his testimony in books and comics, and producing his musical life-of-Jesus movie The Gospel Road.)

The real Johnny Cash, searching for something, in 1959

"The part of John's life we're telling the story about is the part where he pushed God away, and really God started coming back to him, as did belief and love and life and living and art, at the point where the movie ends," Mangold says. "A man who's lost, taking pills and trying to destroy himself, is not a man who you can easily just stick in a seed of faith. That is his period of pushing goodness away from himself, because either he can't accept it, he doesn't feel worthy of it, or he doesn't believe in it. But that journey made him, in a way, not only fulfilling his own destiny, but in a way, picking up his brother's. And it still gives me chills."

Mangold is referring to Cash's admiration for his big brother Jack, who died after being pulled into a table saw when Cash was 12 years old. The memory of his brother—and the guilt he felt because he had gone fishing the day of the accident—would haunt, and even motivate, Cash for the rest of his life.

The film, says Mangold, shows how Cash found himself creatively, by finding a way to channel his demons into something "useful." "He had to find the range of his own creativity, and learn how to control this river of darkness that he had been riding, and corral it in some way … Everyone thinks he was born 'the Man in Black,' but in a way, the identity that developed of this 'Man in Black,' as much as it was something highly marketable and a clever turn of phrase and a great wardrobe, it was also a way of taking control and owning himself, and making it something he was in charge of as opposed to something that was running him."

Mangold brings it back around to Cash's memories of Jack. "He so admired his brother, and his brother wanted to be a preacher, and his brother was such a good boy—religious, obeying his dad, working so hard, so much more focus on his studies. But, with no tarnishing of the memory of Jack Cash, I believe that John became twice, a hundred times the preacher his older brother ever would have become.

"It's not like John's path is one you'd recommend to somebody, but he knew what sin was, and he knew what mistakes felt like, and he knew what it was to forgive."

© Peter T. Chattaway 2005, subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

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Walk the Line	Printer view