Cash Movie

Readers of this blog know I'm a Johnny Cash fan, despite his moral shortfallings. A new movie about Cash is coming out. I'll have to see it, even though it sounds like the producers will try to justify Johnny's decision to leave his wife and four children for June Carter. NYT Link. Excerpts:

Walk the Line may surprise even their long-time fans. Starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as the lead characters, the movie burrows deep into painful territory that Mr. Cash barely explored in two autobiographies, Man in Black, and Cash: The Autobiography . . .

Much about Johnny Cash is well known, almost a clichÃ©. His gravel voice is instantly familiar, and so is his outlaw image as the country singer who dressed in black and sang for convicted felons at Folsom Prison in a best-selling album. As a hell-raiser, he blazed a trail in the early days of rock, wrecking cars, getting arrested, battling drugs, all while leaving his distinctive stamp on American music.

[According to the director, James Mangold], "As we got to know John and June, what we needed them to understand was that the people they were now was not the people they were then," Mr. Mangold said in an interview at his home in a quiet canyon in Santa Monica, Calif. A famous picture by the rock photographer Jim Marshall, of Mr. Cash raising his middle finger, adorned one wall. "And there was the challenge of combining the grand wisdom and spirituality of these elder legends backwards into the young people they were, as they were learning those lessons. To tell how they got to be here, we had to go to those darker places, and not temper it." . . .

"John wanted to make sure the gnarly truth was told, as he put it, but at times he'd back away," [the film's initial producer, James Keach] said. The singer didn't want to blame his first wife, Vivian, with whom he had four daughters, for the marriage's failure, "or his drug addiction on his father, although they had issues," Mr. Keach said. "He did say that the loss of his brother set him afloat in a sea of loneliness for a long time. And that Jack was a great motivating force in his life."

Jack was Mr. Cash's lionized older brother, the pride of his poor, cotton-farming family, who had plans to become a preacher. He died at 14 in an accident with a power saw; the death haunted the singer for years as a permanent source of guilt and latent tension with his father, who disapproved of his younger son's rebellious choices.