My mind is crowded

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON (2005)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I've never heard Daniel Johnston's music but, like any introduction to someone I have next to zero knowledge about, "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" is a haunting and powerful documentary that will prove illuminating enough to want to sample some of his tunes.

Tracing the life of Daniel Johnston proves exhausting and exasperating and frustating, to be sure. Here is a Sacramento, California man (who looks like a shaggier version of Paul LeMat) with manic depression who, from an early age, decorated his basement bedroom into a full-fledged studio for writing songs and drawing his Captain America character in portraits of good and evil. Daniel wanted to be as famous as the Beatles, loved a classmate who was his muse named Laurie (she married a mortician), worked at McDonald's as a busboy (to the point where McDonald's was getting calls from agents), eventually landed a spot on MTV, got acquainted with groups like Sonic Youth and Half Japanese, and then the trouble truly started. He had episodes where he thought the Devil was everywhere, even inside his own friends (he had an obsession with the number 666). He thought people were out to get him, even his own manager whom he fired. It gets to the point where he attacks an elderly woman in her home, and where he nearly kills himself and his father in a private plane. Johnston's reasons for these two strange events were that the elderly woman was pushed out of her two-story bedroom window by the Devil, and the plane incident was his own doing because he was Captain America at that moment. Eventually he is in and out of mental hospitals, which strangely enough builds his legendary status, especially in Austin, Texas.

If you are a fan of Ted Zwigoff's "Crumb," one of the best documentaries ever made, then you'll like "The Devil and Daniel Johnston." Whereas Robert Crumb could separate art from his life, Daniel Johnston feels they are one and the same. Here is a tortured, stubborn artist who filmed most of his life with an 8mm film camera and a video camera, sometimes reenacting his own hellish arguments with his Christian fundamentalist mother by assuming the role of his mother. The question then arises: what contributed to Daniel's mental breakdown at an early age? Was it is his parents who insisted he get a job? Was it the love for Laurie whom he still felt triumphant over even when she got married to someone else? Did his lack of attaining status serve his self-destructive phase? Of course, his albums were never big sellers (5,800 copies were sold through Daniel's new manager at the time) so was he ahead of his time, or are the myths of Daniel's haphazard, chaotic life what make him legendary? The viewer will have to decide.

By the end of "Devil and Daniel Johnston," we see Daniel still living with his parents in Texas and still plugging away at his music with a local punk band. It is difficult to say if Daniel was as manic-depressive as he seemed or if he could control it through his art. That parallel is what makes this film as poetic about the artist's soul as any film I've ever seen.