The Devil and Daniel Johnston


Director: Jeff Feuerzeig
Year: 2005
Rating: 7.5


What a sad and at times painful documentary this is about cult musician Daniel Johnston. He passed away last September at 58 years old and I expect most people had no clue who he was and why the obits were so adulatory towards him. He suffered from mental issues for most of his life, spent a considerable amount of time in institutions but at the same time built up this huge inventory of music - often recorded on cassette tapes by himself - and a very loyal fan base around the world. Other musicians loved his songs and he was recorded by over a hundred of them. I came to him through an album of his songs recorded by K. McCarty that I picked up simply because I liked the cover. I had no idea who Johnston was. It became one of my favorite albums - though since then I have heard it slagged off by Johnston fans as a ripoff and insult to him because she overlayed it with complex musical arrangements. She shows up a lot in this documentary as she was part of the Austen music scene at the same time he was and spent a lot of time with him. Johnston had ended up in Austen through chance - working in a travelling carny show he was beat up and left in the town. He found a job in McDonalds and began handing out cassettes to people of his music. She was one of them and after hearing it thought he was a genius - as did a lot of people.



But his mental condition, delusions, obsession with fighting Satan never allowed him to gain much popularity. At one time Electra wanted to sign him but Metallica was one of their acts and he refused to sign with a devil company. There is a lot of his music available - not quite sure how that came to be other than a manager and friend who comes across as just as obsessed as Johnston does - except with Johnston - saving all his music and art and distributing it on his own. Now his music to be truthful is not an easy listen - often very crudely recorded, very simple instrumentation on a guitar or piano and his high pitched some times off key ethereal quaky voice is both fascinating and a chore to listen to for long. I have a few of his albums and would suggest Continued Story as a good place to start as I think it is a collection of some of his best known songs. Or McCarty's album.



What makes the film particularly poignantly tragic and hits so close to the bone is that Johnston from his early childhood began recording his thoughts on tape and filming himself. As a teenager he shows incredible creative talent in his drawing, his short films and songs. He seems slightly off even at this age but mainly in his awkwardness and weirdness. His parents who were interviewed through the film tried to keep him in line but this kid clearly saw no lines. He went off to college where he fell in love with a girl who married a man in a funeral home - the title of one of his songs - and he became obsessed with her for all of his life writing song after sad love songs about her - one of his albums is titled Songs of Pain . While in Austen he began his series of mental breakdowns diagnosed as bipolar disorder, put on medication which shut down his creativity, off the medicine and another delusional episode ahead - one time forcing his father to crash land a plane into a tree. And so much of this is on tape and we witness the disintegration of this spunky off-beat kid until he is in his fifties where he was living with his parents and getting very obese. It just feels so sad and yet I expect this broken mind sparked his music which is just lyrically strange and wonderful. By the end of the film in 2005 he seems to be in a better place - doing tours and being acclaimed by his peers. So maybe a happy ending after all.