The soundtrack to Walk the Line is a stirring recreation of Cash's music courtesy of producer T-Bone Burnett (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and actor Joaquin Phoenix, who nails every note with conviction. It's a surprising act of mimicry on one level; on another, it serves as a study in the kind of uncompromising masculinity and heroic existentialism that used to appear in our country's pop culture prior to Vietnam. Hearing Phoenix channel Cash is to recall what was lost when The A-Team supplanted Have Gun Will Travel: the mark of the soul. And when Phoenix and Witherspoon combine Southern drawls in "Jackson," it's almost as if real country music--not the plastic stuff manufactured by McGraw et al.--never died. You're also going to want to hear Waylon's son Shooter sing his daddy's anthem "I'm a Long Way From Home." It's another instance of how an artist successfully walks the line between pop and art and comes up with something indispensable.
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