The Devil Inside

Shades of grey: Musician and artist Daniel Johnston, from the film The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Photo Jeff Feuerzeig/Sony Pictures Classics Inc/Mongrel Media.

Late last fall, Daniel Johnston’s official website reported that the 44-year-old singer-songwriter had been hospitalized. Worrisome news, to be sure — there was speculation that he had suffered from lithium poisoning — but not much of a surprise for those familiar with Johnston’s turbulent biography. Afflicted with diabetes and manic depression, Johnston has been in and out of emergency rooms, mental hospitals and jail for much of his life.

What was most touching about the report, however, was the continued concern and support of Johnston’s parents, Bill and Mabel. “This one was scary in a different way,” Mabel Johnston said, acknowledging her son’s past hospitalizations. “It wasn’t [his behaviour] that was the problem, it was that he couldn’t speak or stand up.”

Johnston’s behaviour has been a problem for a long time, and it’s captured with uncommon sensitivity in Jeff Feuerzeig’s new documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. It’s a testament to the power and beauty of Feuerzeig’s film that one can despise Johnston’s music and still love a documentary about him. I, for one, have never been a huge fan of Johnston’s songs, but by the time this very moving film had ended, I was praying the soundtrack was for sale at the concession stand. And if Johnston himself had been at the screening, I would have hugged him and wept into his soft chest.

Docs that inspire such empathy may not be rare, but figures like Johnston truly are — especially in recent American pop music. Guileless yet ambitious, unprotected by self-preservation or PR flak and predisposed equally to genius and masochism, Johnston is the consummate insider/outsider artist. He’s a friend of art-rock legends Sonic Youth and Simpsons creator Matt Groening, but also a regular resident of psychiatric hospitals and his parents’ basement (where he currently lives). In short, he’s had an extraordinary, fascinating and sad life — one ripe for chronicling.

Listen up: Johnston in his youth. Photo J. McConnico/Sony Pictures Classics Inc/Mongrel Media.

Fortunately for Feuerzeig, Johnston has done a lot of the filmmaker’s work for him. With a prodigy’s confidence in his own artistic destiny, Johnston captured every waking moment of his adolescence and early adulthood — in Super 8 films, drawings and, most important, cassette recordings. Featuring songs about his everyday life, these tapes are just as notable for appearances by his Christian fundamentalist mother, who on one cassette shrieks that Johnston is “an unprofitable servant of the Lord.” Feuerzeig handles this rich archive admirably, crafting a film that would sit comfortably on a bill with Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation and Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb.

Raised in West Virginia, Johnston was a goofy misfit brimming with creativity and devoted to comic books and the Beatles. Often at odds with his family — and increasingly prone to dramatic mood swings — Johnston dropped out of college and, in the early ’80s, joined the circus, eventually drifting to Austin, Texas. It proved a right-place-right-time move; there, he found kindred spirits among the burgeoning indie-rock scene. Johnston started passing around the tapes he’d been making, which featured the heartbreaking songs he would become famous for; with titles like Casper, the Friendly Ghost, Walking the Cow and Speeding Motorcycle, these ditties oscillated between the irritating and the plaintive, the gentle and the grotesque. Singing with a reedy tone and slight lisp, Johnston’s voice often sounded as if it were beamed from an alien kindergarten. When he first appeared on MTV in 1986, he was working at McDonald’s.

But as a longtime friend of Johnston’s says in the film, when things start to go well for Daniel, invariably they also go really badly. Frequent LSD use made him violent. Just as his music career was taking off, he assaulted his manager with a lead pipe; one Christmas, Johnston broke his brother’s rib. In one very busy two-week trip to New York in the early ’90s, Johnston alienated the members of Sonic Youth, was arrested for defacing the Statue of Liberty, spent some time in Bellevue Hospital, was assaulted in a shelter on the Bowery and still managed to play a gig at the famous rock club CBGB. His Christian upbringing always a powerful influence, Johnston was convinced that Satan had given him talent in order to destroy him. “It was my fate to be famous and damned,” Johnston says in the film.

Songs in the key of life: Johnston at the piano. Photo Monica Dee/ Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media.

There were long stretches in mental hospitals. Record deals came and went. Kurt Cobain became a fan. A steady diet of anti-psychotic drugs and Mountain Dew clouded Johnston’s brain and caused him to become bloated. After a 1990 show in Austin in front of 3,000 people, Johnston’s father, an amateur pilot, flew the two of them back home. At least, he tried to — Johnston, off his meds, wrested control of the plane, causing them to plummet into the trees below. Remarkably, the two were unharmed and, in the post-crash pictures that show up in the film, Johnston appears almost delighted.

Such legendary tales unfold with dizzying regularity in the film, but Feuerzeig has an unerring sense of rhythm and judgment. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is dense but always compelling, shifting smoothly between the different chapters in Johnston’s chaotic life. The filmmaker is relentlessly inventive in his use of Johnston’s audio letters, interviews with dozens of Johnston’s intimates and re-enactments of pivotal incidents. A long discussion of Johnston’s obsessive (and unrequited) love for a high-school sweetheart — a Rosebud moment of sorts — culminates with an image of a massive pile of cassette tapes, arranged by Feuerzeig in the shape of a giant heart.

As romantic and hagiographic as the film certainly is — some viewers will bridle, for example, at statements that Johnston is a better musician than the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson — Feuerzeig reserves his greatest affection for Johnston’s long-suffering parents. Bill Johnston’s concern about what will happen to his talented, tortured son after he and his wife die is more devastating than any of Johnston’s odes to his own broken heart. In an indelible, climactic shot, the frail couple sit on the lawn of their suburban Houston home. Johnston, obese and glowering, looms over them. It’s a perfect evocation of the film’s haunting beauty, its subject’s fascinating narcissism and a family’s bewildered, incessant pain.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston opens April 28 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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