Entertainment

Johnny Cash famously sang that he'd been "every- where, man," an appropriate claim for a musician who lived a long, varied life full of ups, downs and in-betweens. But vast lives don't always make for great movies, so James Mangold faced a challenge in tackling Cash's story in the new biopic Walk the Line, which opens Friday.

How do you dramatize a life that walked a line from Carl Perkins to Nine Inch Nails, from Sam Phillips to Rick Rubin? Mr. Mangold had decisions to make, and he made a good one by starting with Cash's youth and ending in the late '60s with his marriage to the eternal object of his desire, June Carter.

"It seemed clear to me that the movie should end with the proposal," Mr. Mangold said at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Walk the Line premiered. "You start a movie with a guy with a hole in his heart, and June is the antidote."

That focused thinking has been the key to success for a string of recent biopics. Like the recent Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck and last year's The Aviator, Walk the Line looks at a famous life through the prism of a particular period or series of events, eschewing the all-encompassing approach of cramming an entire life into the space of a feature film.

That's why Mr. Mangold chose to end the story when he did, instead of extending nearly 35 years to Cash's death in 2003.

"You have a guy with a drug problem, and he's licked it by the end of the '60s. You have a guy with an incredible darkness, and by the end of the '60s he's learned how to apply that and use it, instead of subvert it or repress it.

"Each one of those story threads comes to fruition in '68 or '69. So what am I going to do, extend the movie by 40 minutes to show him having a TV show and being happy and meeting Rick Rubin?"

That level of focus might have benefited Ray, the celebrated portrait of Ray Charles that boasted countless fine moments and performances but still sagged beneath the weight of trying to squeeze everything in. Going back further, focus might have helped Cleopatra , the bloated 1963 epic that still stands as a symbol of Hollywood excess run amok.

The dilemma is pretty simple. Anyone worth having his or her own movie is going to have an intriguing life. But whereas that life may fit just fine into a sprawling book – say, Gerald Clarke's 640-page biography Capote – movies require a dramatic arc and narrative structure that grabs us from the get-go and stays around for the two-hour running time.

So if you want details on Truman Capote's childhood, early career and life after writing In Cold Blood, read Mr. Clarke's book. But if you want a taut dramatization of what it took to write In Cold Blood and the psychological toll it took on the author, see Capote (which is in fact based on Mr. Clarke's book), or Have You Heard?, a film about the same subject due out next year.

Capote director Bennett Miller was drawn to the project largely because the structure and themes reminded him of a classical tragedy. "It's about a guy who destroys himself, and his fatal flaw is greed," says the director. "He was greedy not for money, but for praise."

But these elements can be foregrounded only by narrowing the story's focus, from an entire life to a pivotal episode in that life. This makes Capote another successful example of the focused biopic.

Of course, sticking to one chapter of a life can also be deceptive. A crucial part of the Walk the Line arc deals with June's soothing influence on Johnny; she's depicted as a big reason why he kicked his habit of booze and pills and as the catalyst for the movie's happy ending.

However, like so many addicts, Johnny fell off and got back on the wagon – well after the period covered in Walk the Line. Mr. Mangold was adamant about his desire not to sugarcoat his Johnny Cash, and the film shows both his successes and his demons.

"Nothing would be more hurtful to people I care about than to turn very meaningful lives filled with pain and joy into something hollow," he says. "So the worst damage I could do to them would be to inflict some kind of hagiography upon them."

By ending the film where he does, he gets to skip the hagiography and have his happy ending, too. (Plus, we don't have to see Joaquin Phoenix in septuagenarian makeup.)

Sometimes, a biopic's focus extends even to the title. Take The Aviator, Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic that won four Oscars last year. Other titles might work for various chapters in Hughes' life: Lonely Boy or Crazy Guy in Las Vegas. But the movie isn't about Hughes' childhood, or his old age. It's about the 20 or so years he spent obsessing over and building aircraft. Hence, The Aviator.

"In my research, what emerged for me as the most interesting way to frame his story was aviation," says Aviator screenwriter John Logan. "Any writer coming to a historical event or person will have a different response to it. You could write the story of Howard Hughes the filmmaker or Howard Hughes the lover, of Howard Hughes the recluse. But to my understanding, aviation was the great passion that abided in his life, and it seemed to me an exciting, cinematic framework."

In the end, it's all about framework. Lives, after all, are messy, unruly things. They don't always work out the way you'd like, and they certainly don't bend and conform to fit the shape of a Hollywood movie. So filmmakers must do what they always do: make choices. It's the only way to determine which part of a story is worth telling.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com