There are few artists who embody the tragic and the beautiful quite like Daniel Johnston, and this documentary does a startling job of capturing both elements of the man. The film delves deep into the life of the talented artist, filmmaker and musician, in the early days through a large collection of archive footage and photographs - another documentary heavily indebted to the super 8-boom and its use amongst households in the 1970s and '80s.
Johnston was raised a strict Christian and clearly misunderstood by his parents and peers. After dropping out of college, he was shipped from relative to relative in the hope he would settle, and eventually he found solace in an organ in his brother's basement, set up a recording station, and began his career. After running away and joining the circus, he ended up in hip and happening Austin, Texas and was embraced by the music community. It’s a fascinating insight into the foundations of lo-fi music; Johnston was often unable to replicate his recordings, so in order to make a new tape to give to somebody he would record the whole thing from scratch and then again, and again, making every tape he gave to somebody a complete original. This is somehow a fitting encapsulation of Johnston as both a person and a performer – you never quite know if he’ll be the same as the last time you encountered him. Just as things were looking great for him, things took a turn for the worse. His manic depression coupled with ill-advised LSD use overtook him - he became obsessed with demons and became terrifyingly unstable, ending up in several hospital’s and even being arrested after he tried to break into an elderly woman’s house who became so frightened she jumped out a second story window, breaking both her ankles.
The sheer range of footage capturing Daniel’s various mental states is both incredible and heartbreaking. His physical and psychological breakdown is literally captured step-by-step in chronological order. Even when he is allowed to go to New York to record with Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Moe Tucker (The Velvet Underground) and Jad Fair, things end up going terribly, and Lee Ranaldo has captured it all. For fear of being returned to his parents and a mental hospital, he ends up in a men’s shelter in Brooklyn. Even amid physical violence he still seems happy, being in the city that he is convinced will make him famous. The film’s gut-wrenching core comes when his father Bill (a pilot) tells the tale of how on the way back home from a show Daniel, off his medication, became convinced he was Casper (a comic favourite of his) mid-flight. He took the keys out of the engine, shut it off and threw them out the window, only for the plane to crash with both of them in it. Bill physically breaks down during the retelling and it’s difficult not to join him.
The rest of the film - and indeed Daniel’s life - is basically spent in various drug-induced states in an attempt to battle his condition. To the ever-looming question "is he okay?", the answer is still no, but he is better, stabler and managing to live and play, even if he has forgotten a lot of what he once knew. The sad realisation is that the time in his life he was actually making music contently is a very brief window. He is an extremely fractured human being and has never really recovered from these episodes, musically or personally.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston deals with its subject in a sensitive and intelligent manner. Whether you consider him to be a genius or a mental patient with a guitar, your opinion is somewhat irrelevant watching this film, due it being so gripping - the footage, insight and story of Daniel Johnston is riveting. Quite simply, this is one of the greatest music documentaries ever made.