Sad but compelling film tells cult musician’s story
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, April 13, 2006
The saga of singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston makes a strange but compulsively watchable subject in “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” a Sundance award-winning documentary.
| Riveting: A compulsively watchable documentary about a talented singer-songwriter struggling with mental illness. A glut of home movies makes this a rounded picture of Daniel Johnston’s demons.
Rated: PG-13 rating is for language, subject matter Now showing: Varsity |
Who is Daniel Johnston? The very definition of a cult figure, Johnston had a brief moment of modest musical glory in the early 1990s, when his self-produced cassettes came to the attention of people such as Kurt Cobain.
Johnston’s mental illness prevented him from capitalizing on his quasi-fame. Still does. Filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig has examined Johnston’s life and found a terribly sad story to tell.
As a kid, Johnston was wildly creative, and used tape recorders and home movies to document himself – which means Feuerzeig has plenty of raw materials to fill his film with. Johnston grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family in a small town in West Virginia, but chafed at rules. (In one of his kid films, he plays both himself and his nagging mom.)
His long-suffering parents obviously didn’t get their son. But as he moved into his college years, Daniel’s behavior became less teen-rebellious and more disturbing. At one point he literally ran away with the circus, waking up one morning in Austin, Texas – site of his brief flowering of musical genius.
Bizarre behavior and a tendency to break into fire-breathing sermons about demons ushered Johnston into a life of mental institutions and medication. As we see in the opening sequence, he still performs to affectionate crowds, his physical appearance – now gray and heavyset in his mid-40s – much altered from his youth.
We hear plenty of Johnston’s music, delivered in a strangled little-boy voice that is as emotionally straightforward as it is technically untrained. Johnston seems incapable of irony, which may be why his songs have captivated listeners in a modern music landscape obsessed with hipness.
Comparisons with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, another original pop-music maestro afflicted with mental illness, may be overly generous. But Johnston has some sort of intense talent, and his struggle to access that talent is a terrible spectacle.
The events of Johnston’s life make for compelling watching. There’s footage of a college sweetheart, for instance, a woman who has been out of Johnston’s life for decades but remains an inspiration for his songwriting.
Downward spirals are equally arresting, including an incredible incident in which a delusional Johnston forced a crash in his father’s small plane.
Like watching the dysfunctional families of “Crumb” and “Capturing the Friedmans,” this film presents some uneasy questions. Feuerzeig clearly has sympathy for his subject, but one can be forgiven for finding some of this material intrusive, at times uncomfortably so. The movie is over, but Johnston’s life, complicated as it is, goes on.
