Sorry Entertainer
The Devil and Daniel JohnstonDirected by Jeff Feuerzeig
Starring Daniel Johnston
Though nominally a music documentary in that it is, in fact, a documentary about a musician, The Devil and Daniel Johnston is no more tailored for rock aesthetes than Crumb was for comic book geeks or Roger & Me for unemployed auto workers. Its appeal comes not from the subject’s legacy — Daniel Johnston’s rickety self-recordings and Alfalfa-like voice may be an acquired taste — but from the story of his battle with manic depression and the remarkable raw material director Jeff Feuerzeig had at his disposal to tell it.
Before he became rock’s most lovable basket case, Johnston was merely a precocious West Virginia kid who drew pictures and wrote songs instead of studying and taped his mom giving him grief about it. He dropped out of art school and, yes, ran away to join a carnival, then developed a following in Austin, Texas, performing songs about God, ghosts and pining for a classmate named Laurie. At a Butthole Surfers show in 1986, a 25-year-old Johnston took his first (but not last) hit of acid, turning his worsening manic depression into a full-on psychotic break, complete with ravings about demons. (In the movie, head Butthole Gibby Haynes denies any responsibility … while getting his teeth drilled in a dentist’s office.)
While committed to a mental hospital in 1988 for chasing an elderly woman out of her second-story window — one of many disturbing incidents that included an attack on his former manager with a lead pipe, an arrest for spray painting Jesus-fish inside the Statue of Liberty and springing himself from Bellevue to play a gig at CBGB — Johnston recorded a one-hour radio special to promote his new album, which sold the Jersey-bred Feuerzeig, a fan of Johnston’s since the mid-’80s, on making the troubled troubadour his muse. “He performed elaborate skits, playing all the characters in multiple voices, improvising songs. It’s legendary and is much, much scarier than Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds,” he recalls. “I wanted to make a film as good as that broadcast, showing all aspects of his personality — the highs, the lows, the comedy, the tragedy.”
But it wasn’t until seeing Johnston play a rare show in New York in 2001 that Feuerzeig finally mobilized. Johnston and his long-suffering parents, Bill and Mabel, with whom he was now living in Waller, Texas, offered the filmmaker unlimited access to countless hours of footage and audio tapes on one condition: The movie could not gloss over any of the drug abuse that exacerbated Johnston’s already fragile psyche.
And it doesn’t, even at the risk of alienating viewers or threatening to exploit his illness for freakshow value. (“Daniel exploited it himself by writing about it,” defends Feuerzeig. “I think that’s brilliant.”) Though he largely comes off as a teddy-bear savant, the hint of menace is never far from the surface. The most dramatic example of this provides the movie’s rawest moment. Following a triumphant performance at the 1990 Austin Music Awards, Johnston boarded Bill’s private plane for West Virginia, only to decide mid-flight that his father was possessed by Satan and thus must be forcibly relieved of the plane’s yoke. Though no one was hurt in the ensuing crash, Bill bursts into tears recalling the story, as will all but the most jaded viewers. Decades of pent-up pain, unleashed in one cathartic blast … and this was only the first day of interviewing.
Although contemporaries and friends testify to Johnston’s difficult genius, his side of the story is represented almost entirely by the treasure trove of audio diaries and video footage spanning over 30 years. Johnston seems to have been rolling tape during every remotely significant event of his life, and many of the insignificant ones. “You couldn’t make a film about John Lennon like this,” Feuerzeig marvels. “Daniel did all the work; he just needed someone to finish the job. You’re right there in his head with him.” Safe to say, that’s an unsettling place to spend an hour and a half.
And just as the highs in Johnston’s life are invariably followed by sudden, demoralizing lows, the movie’s happy-ish ending tacks on a disturbing coda that shows this glassy-eyed man-child dancing spastically in a stained T-shirt. “I wanted to end with the truth. He’s not out of the woods,” Feuerzeig says. Far from it — an incoherent Johnston was recently rushed to the hospital for possible lithium poisoning, and his future is an open, scary book. “What will happen to Daniel when his parents are gone? No one knows.”
