Walk the Line

Johnny Cash was the 1950’s rebel rocker. He made Elvis, Roy Orbison and the rest look like overdressed Momma’s boys!* (When was the last time you heard someone singing on the radio about shooting a man just to watch him die?)
Walk the Line sketches Johnny Cash’s childhood and early musical career. He grows up in poverty and hardship. His older brother is tragically killed. He is unable to be the “good” son his severe father wants him to be.
Johnny is portrayed as constantly striving for something that is not quite within reach. He is haunted by his lost brother. And he struggles with his sudden success and the strain of constantly being on tour. Drugs complicate his predicament further and lead to the collapse of his first marriage.
June Carter is his angel through it all. Even as a boy, he loved listening to the child star as she sang on the radio. She is his inspiration, his love, his best friend. She and her family are the key to bringing him back from the edge.
Walk the Line is a story of redemption—a real-life prodigal son. While this film doesn’t make faith its central focus, it cannot be ignored. But it’s also an honest, often uncomfortable critique of we Christians.
When Johnny is breaking his drug addiction, he is protected at gunpoint from his old dealer by June’s staunch Christian parents. At the same time, when June takes him along to church, he approaches reluctantly, unsure how he will be received.
When Cash tells a record company exec that he wants to do a concert in a maximum security prison, he is told “Your fans are gospel folk, Johnny. They’re Christians, and they don’t wanna hear you singing to a bunch of murderers and rapists, tryin’ to cheer ‘em up.”
“Then they ain’t Christians,” is his reply.
Chistians who ain’t Christian?!
When Johnny first auditions at Sun Studios in Memphis, Sam Phillips throws down a challenge to him and his hopeful band. Sam doesn’t think this hymnbook gospel music Johnny’s playing will sell. It’s the same old tired thing he’s heard so many times before. He wants something real. He wants something honest, warts-and-all, because he knows that’s what people need to hear. He wants to hear what you’d sing if you were dying and had time for only one song.
Johnny Cash rose to that challenge. Not just with that first performance of “Folsom Prison Blues” but in his life as a whole. In his music and in his life, he dealt honestly with his failures and his faith. His own struggles gave him the ability to lift others and lend his voice to “the downtrodden, the forgotten, and the lovelorn.”**
Are we the kind of Christians for whom others’ best efforts are never good enough, who cling religiously to tired clichés and who ignore those who don’t fit our idea of how things should be? Are we Christians who ain’t Christian? Or do we sing (and live) with the honesty and passion of someone who knows they have time for only one song?

* Ron Wall from GodSpy.com.
** Walk the Line production notes.