The romantic cliché that all artists are a little bit mad is put through its paces (if never seriously questioned) in this documentary about a mentally ill man whom Kurt Cobain, the lead singer for Nirvana, once called the greatest living songwriter.
The youngest son of a fundamentalist Christian family from Virginia, Daniel Johnston grew up with a compulsion to create, churning out Super-8 films, comic-book-style drawings and cassette tapes full of songs and stories.
But in college, he began to exhibit symptoms of manic-depression and grandiosity before running away to join a traveling carnival. He wound up in Austin, Texas, where his homemade cassettes of plaintive folk songs made a splash on the underground music scene.
After a brief stint as a curiosity on MTV, Johnston became a minor celebrity as a self-taught singer-songwriter, but he spent the 1990s in a downward spiral, alternating between stays in mental hospitals and brushes with the law.
Now in his mid-40s, Johnston lives with his parents in Texas and continues to make music with a band, but as he announces in the film’s opening voice- over, he considers himself little more than “the ghost of Daniel Johnston.”
Jeff Feuerzeig, who won the best-director award at the 2005 Sundance festival, cobbles together a moving portrait of the artist as his own ghost, using a wealth of material provided by Johnston, from home movies to audiocassette diaries to dozens of original and often heartbreakingly beautiful songs.
*** | “The Devil and Daniel Johnston”
PG-13 for thematic elements, drugs and language|1 hour, 50 minutes| DOCUMENTARY|Directed by Jeff Feuerzeig; director of photography Fortunato Procopio; edited by Tyler Hubby|Opens today at the Mayan.