The Devil and Daniel Johnston is an inspiring and devastating portrait of an artists' wild journey through dementia.
Jeff Feurzeig's film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, is a raucous yet genuine documentary that encapsulates Daniel Johnston's struggle to reconcile his prodigious artistic talent with his feeble mental health. It's an intent look into the mind of a man whose delusions of grandeur have clouded his creative vision. By intricately blending current footage, performance clips, super 8 movies, and a plethora of recorded audiotapes from Daniel's life, Feurzeig has assembled a remarkable portrait of Daniel Johnston: artist, musician, filmmaker, and lunatic.
The film traces Daniel's life, starting with his early years when as a youngster he fell in love with comic books and with Beatles music. It became evident that artistic appetite overrode all other aspects of his life and his disapproving Christian fundamentalist parents tried to discourage him from his art-centricity wanting him instead to focus on becoming a "profitable servant". But Daniel wanted fame, so much so that in 1985 he managed to weasel his way onto MTV to plug his self-recorded album, "Hi, How Are You?" Following his MTV appearance were a string of bizarrely opportune events that catapulted him to fame. After running away with the carnival, he ended up stranded in Austin, Texas, just as the city's music scene was coming into bloom. This is where he met Kathy McCarty, band member of Glass Eye, and ended up being asked to open for their band. The most peculiar publicity came when Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was spotted regularly sporting a T-shirt featuring Daniel's artwork.
Running parallel to these feats of fame were alarming indicators that Daniel needed to seek mental help. The first noted incidence was when Daniel's parents sent him off to college, first to Abilene Christian University and then to art school at Kent State. Unable to make the adjustments to scholastic life, his parents pulled him out of school. But the incident that seemed to push him over the edge was an LSD trip at a Butthole Surfers concert. His use of acid seemed to trigger violent outbursts as Daniel believed that his family & friends were possessed by demons. This sealed his descent to madness, and was the beginning of countless admissions into mental hospitals.
Being a fan of Johnston's, Feurzeig treats his subject with reverence and although he makes mention of the creative genius-madness connection, he doesn't romanticize the cliché. The Devil and Daniel Johnston isn't a film for the indie or outsider music set (although they would appreciate it) nor does it fall in with documentaries about mental illness. Feurzeig succeeded in crafting a rich, colorful and textured portrait of an artist's wild ride through dementia and his quest to function in this world as a human being.
