Walk The Line

Herald rating: ****

Just as songs go verse-chorus-verse, movies about the folks who sing them never stray far from the sheet music.

As it was with last year's Ray, so it is with Walk The Line - only more so. This biopic of the first third of the life of Johnny Cash can't shake its genre conventions any more than Cash could sing high notes.

You can sure tick the boxes - the early life beset by tragedy, the formative musical experience, his first flush of success, his slide into drug-fuelled near-oblivion, his redemption through the love of a good woman, his triumphant comeback at the recording of the Live at Folsom Prison album.

At times, you could be in any number of made-for-television movies about any rock'n'roll pioneer of Cash's generation.

It's far more conventional a film than the star it portrays, or the love story (between Cash and June Carter) it depicts.

Executive producer on the project was their son, John Carter Cash, and while he pulls few punches about his daddy's bad habits before he married June, it still feels as if we're getting the authorised version of how their seemingly doomed - and for Cash extra-marital - affair turned into country music's greatest matrimonial institution.

However, while Walk the Line keeps it simple, sentimental and is too busy joining the dots of Cash's career to worry about musical context or insight, the performances manage to carry the movie to a height it otherwise doesn't really deserve to reach.

With his hooded eyes and permanent scowl, Joaquin Phoenix makes an excellent Cash. His attempts at that bottom-of-the-well voice more than past muster, and it's a powerful performance whether he's up on stage holding his guitar like a loaded rifle, or wrecking his dressing room as one of Cash's drug-induced mood swings kicks at his soul.

The greater revelation of the film is Witherspoon's June Carter. She makes a great portrait of the sassy Carter, a woman toughened by her life on the road with the likes of Cash, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, while trying to maintaining the veneer of Nashville Sweetheart despite two failed offscreen marriages.

She nails the whole thing beautifully, especially when she's dealing with Johnny, who would keep coming a'courting, lovesick and over-medicated.

Phoenix is what makes Walk the Line rock, but Witherspoon makes it sing.

CAST: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon
DIRECTOR: James Mangold
RATING: M, drug use
RUNNING TIME: 130 mins
SCREENING: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley, Rialto, Bridgeway