My Darling Vivian is a loving tribute to Johnny Cash’s first wife, Vivian Liberto. Liberto has been pretty fairly written out of Cash’s history, particularly as the love story of Johnny and June Carter Cash has been in the ascendant. Vintage photos, home movies, vintage TV footage of Cash in action, and interviews of Cash and Liberto’s four daughters create an intimate portrait of a strong woman who internalized the stress of being first a famous person’s wife and then ex-wife. It’s a stirring, honest portrayal, particularly as she is a noteworthy person in a time period when she had limited outlets.

Liberto and Cash met in 1951 when she was 17 and he was 18. Their 1954 marriage lasted for nearly 13 years, and they had the aforementioned four daughters: Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara. Watching the siblings (mostly) calmly dissect their parent’s marriage is fascinating and, to the credit of the women, never voyeuristic. The eldest (who is also pretty famous), Rosanne, states that each of them, in essence, had a different mother given the spread of years between their births. For the first few years of marriage, Cash was family oriented. He would come home after a tour and take trips with them. Liberto was always elegant, and her looks were simply striking. Rosanne mentions how beautifully put together her mom was and how she thought that she was the epitome of womanhood. In the home movies of the family laughing and horsing around, they look like the perfect family.

Of course, we know what happens. Johnny started popping pills and snorting cocaine, and the marriage very much goes downhill. Eventually, the family ends up in a desert ranch near Ojai, California, with Cash gone on tour practically all the time, and there are rattlesnakes everywhere that Vivian is constantly shooting. Rosanne describes a heartbreaking moment growing up, when she is allowed to stay up late the night when her father is due to come home. She can see cars winding up the road from town to their house. There is a fork in the road, one leading toward their house, one away. Rosanne is up until one in the morning looking out the picture window getting super excited with each pair of headlights she sees, only to watch them turn left instead of right. The next day Cash arrives with no real excuse. There is hell to pay.

This film offers a corrective to the portrayal of Vivian in James Mangold’s Walk the Line (2005), a biopic Vivian refused to see and all four daughters disown. Before her death in 2005, Vivian wrote a book about her life, telling secrets she didn’t tell anyone, which also irks her daughters because, sensibly, they would have preferred to have heard them from her personally rather than from the book.

Eye-opening and involving, the documentary celebrates a unique person overlooked in the development of Johnny Cash and, in turn, country music, and who is, more importantly, fascinating in her own right.

My Darling Vivian – First Look from The Film Collaborative on Vimeo.