The same line, that would be, as the previous year's Ray, a musical biopic on a recently fallen giant of popular song, C&W instead of R&B, Johnny Cash instead of Ray Charles, two years dead instead of mere months, but the same backstage tale of early poverty and tragedy, meteoric ascent, marital discord, drug abuse, salvation. Fewer people this time, in describing Joaquin Phoenix's impersonation of the Man in Black, will be inclined to link the adjective "uncanny" to the noun "likeness." Though he has obviously studied hard for the part, copying the horselike head-toss and breaststroker's air-gulp in performance on stage, he lacks both the stature and the weight: a sort of Cash shortage. It doesn't help that his singing (separate from his head-tossing and air-gulping) is of dog-howling caliber. Reese Witherspoon's June Carter -- a ten-year-old voice on the radio in Cash's cotton-picking childhood, a touring mate in the mid-Fifties along with Jerry Lee, Buddy, and Elvis, and finally his second wife in the late-Sixties, when the movie ends -- dances rings around him. And sings them, too. With Ginnifer Goodwin and Robert Patrick; directed by James Mangold. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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