James Mangold’s Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18) is thought to be primarily a one-man show — a Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Pheonix supposedly giving an ace performance as the famed country singer and…you know, delivering the same kind of panache that Jamie Foxx brought to his portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray. What the film really is, I’m hearing, is more of double-header love story groove about the relationship between Cash and wife June Carter (Reese Witherspoon). I hear that Pheonix and Witherspoon tear it up equally, that Witherspoon gives as good as she gets…and they both do their own singing. The film begins and ends with Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison concert and then starts sifting through the Cash-Carter story spanning from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s. The film is going to the Toronto Film Festival, perhaps to Telluride (or perhaps not), and definitely not to Venice. Telluride is pretty much the place to show a quality film to the media elite and start the ball rolling, so that sounds like the opening ticket…but one never knows how these things will shake down. The trailer tells me the film is on the same level as Ray and Coal Miner’s Daughter. It conveys the idea right away it’s going to be dramatically rich and visually refined.