Johnny Cash's life gets traced from his Arkansas childhood through the Sun Records years, the Folsom Prison concerts, and the late-career revival built around producer Rick Rubin's American Recordings sessions. The film gives particular weight to his final decade, when he recorded the five-disc acoustic collection "Unearthed" while grieving the death of his wife, June Carter Cash, just months before his own passing in 2003. Interviews and archival performance footage cover his struggles with addiction, his relationship with June, and the string of covers and originals that turned him into an unlikely icon for a much younger audience near the end of his career. The documentary treats that late resurgence as the emotional core of the story, framing a man who had already lived several careers finding one more, stripped down to just his voice and a guitar, before the end came.