Trailer
Plot summary
Johnny Cash, called J.R. as a boy, grows up on an Arkansas cotton farm during the Great Depression. A sawmill accident kills his older brother Jack while J.R. is out fishing, and their father Ray blames him for it. Old enough to leave, he enlists in the military and serves in West Germany, where a guitar and a film about Folsom Prison prompt him to write songs. After his discharge he marries Vivian and settles in Memphis, Tennessee, selling door to door while playing with a band. An audition for Sam Phillips at Sun Records earns the group a contract. On tour with the rising Sun singers he meets June Carter, a country star since childhood, and the pull between them complicates two marriages.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Walk the Line (2005)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film has its origins in a 1993 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: Johnny Cash guest-starred and he and June Carter became friends with the show's star Jane Seymour and her ex-husband James Keach, who was directing; by the mid-1990s Cash had asked Keach to make a film of his life.
- All of Cash's vocal tracks in the film and on the accompanying soundtrack are played and sung by Phoenix, who lowered his voice by an octave with the help of a voice coach.
- Russell Crowe was offered the role of Cash but turned it down as he felt it would feel wrong, a decision he later regretted.
- Witherspoon found learning the autoharp a greater difficulty than the singing and hired Kit Alderson, who also taught Phoenix guitar, to teach her; she experienced severe stage fright and physical illness before her first live performance scene in front of extras.
- A single-disc DVD and a two-disc collector edition were released on February 28, 2006, and these editions sold three million copies on their first day of release.
- The film earned $119.5 million in North America and $66.9 million in the rest of the world for a total of $186.4 million against a $28 million budget, and it was the all-time highest-grossing music biopic until Straight Outta Compton surpassed it in 2015.
- Cash's daughter Rosanne Cash did not enjoy the "painful" experience of seeing the film, because it had the three most damaging events of her childhood: her parents' divorce, her father's drug addiction and something else she could not remember.
