Johnny Cash has been more commercially active in his latter and posthumous years than he was for much of the ’80s and ’90s. His marriage to June became an iconic relationship—the great, hard-fought love, so much so that on Truckstop Honeymoon’s new Delivery Boy, Mike West and Katie Euliss sing “Johnny & June” using the Cashes relationship as a model for how theirs could be. Michael Streissguth’s biography of Cash suggests that the relationship wasn’t as simple as it seemed. His depiction of Cash’s last days without June is heartbreaking, suggesting how deeply in love with her he was, but the drugs he supposedly kicked in the ’70s returned off and on throughout his life, and as he faded as a force in the marketplace, he returned to drugs and left everyone to deal with the consequences. In Streissguth’s account, June stayed through that period more because she was aware of the standing and perks that came from being Cash’s wife than out of some pure, ideal love.

Johnny Cash does a good job of revealing Cash as a person with larger than life passions, but by debunking the myth of his escape from drugs, it also often makes him appear to be a smaller person than we think. The Cash story we think of doesn’t involve him cheating on his first wife—Roseanne Cash’s mother—while courting June. It doesn’t involve his ability to drop almost any problem in his manager or band’s lap, and Marty Stuart comes off well as his bandleader and daughter Cindy’s husband who often worked to smooth out a situation, look out for Johnny’s interests and do what was possible to preserve the Cash legend.

Clearly the Cash Streissguth likes most is the Cash who became friends with Bob Dylan, the Cash that recorded Live at Folsom Prison—the boundary-crossing, politically and artistically progressive Cash, and like many fans of that period, he has issues with the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings that became Cash’s final musical statements. Still, by documenting the sprawling, complicated man Cash was—at times confronting Cash’s own self-mythologizing writings—he makes Cash a more compelling and real figure.