The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)

Just perfect...

A lot of fun.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Daniel Johnston is a singer, songwriter and artist from Austin, Texas. He is brought up in a religious family. He starts getting notice. When MTV comes to town, he barges his way onto the scene. He becomes a known underground artist and then discovered to be manic depressive as his disturbing behavior gets more noticeable.This documentary uses a lot of home videos and personal testimony from Johnston. It gives a slice of a mad mind. It's a little sad no matter how one feels about Johnston's work. It's too straight forward structurally. In the beginning, it's his childhood but the movie doesn't explain who he is. There is no real drama here. He's a disturbed man with loving parents, fans and some talent.

This, the story of the very living and breathing Daniel Johnston, is a well-made shot at capturing the spirit of his work until 2005, when the documentary was made.Even if you haven't heard his music, or even if you don't like it, this is a remarkable person and makes for a bigger film than most sci-fi can lay claim to.Johnston started making music while living in his parents' basement. His mother berated him with not being a good Christian while he drew, painted and filmed with unrestrained zeal, and suddenly he started playing the piano and writing lyrics. He released his own music on cassette and started getting known.At the same time, his mental problems started surfacing; he has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has gone through major periods of manic behaviour, often connected to visions of The Devil.His songwriting is monumental, and this documentary follows him well through bouts of creativity, friendship, his One Love, his relationship with his mother, working with other musicians, his long-standing job at McDonalds and his incarceration with mental institutions.This documentary provided me with a peep-hole into everybody's soul, not just Johnston's. He's a lovable guy

Many people choose to dismiss Daniel Johnston as a demented fool, a hack impostor, an exceptionally lucky freak - more an oddity than a genuine talent. This is not to be unexpected, but these labels only express the fear - the reflexive and irrational terror - that most people experience in the face of true originality. Too often people naively, impulsively, cruelly denigrate those things which most challenge or bewilder them.Daniel Johnston's art and music is certainly not commercial, slick, mainstream, or easy. It requires a definite but modest adjustment of the ordinary standards by which we judge creativity. This accommodation is reasonable and well deserved because Daniel doesn't operate and strive along the ordinary paths of creativity. He answers to his own very personal, arbitrary, special creative authority. And it's not that he's oblivious to the mainstream, the popular, the normal; it simply doesn't dominate him. So, naturally, his art is going to be a little more unrecognizable, a little more mysterious, and a lot more misunderstood. His psychiatric challenges have served him well as barricades to the "common" and "trite", and shepherded him into much greener, virgin, magical pastures. His lyrics, his metaphors, his themes, his obsessions and his terrors are so acutely, so authentically, so imaginatively expressed through such inspired rhymes and rhythms that the apparent lo-fi crudeness of his method is all the more compelling. His message, as much as any other profound artist's has ever been, is found equally in his style. This clunky, rambling, unpolished heap of piano tinklings, guitar thrashings, and plaintive croakings are the music of a sincere human heart seeking satisfaction. Alas, what alarms so many detractors may be his curious appearance and erratic behavior - the unfortunate downside of his condition. Witnessing such an intensely intimate examination of a fractured mind is a very rare privilege. There have been many starkly sober, or coldly clinical, and even overly melodramatic, sensationalistic investigations of mental illness put to film, but never one so absurdly entertaining. Is Daniel putting us all on, is this all just a grand devious hoax, I kept asking myself? How could a mind so gifted, so precise, so elegant at creating such outrageously poignant tunes be so tragically unreliable in every other way? The disconnect is enough to make me crazy...Then there's the issue of fame, of how fame dominates our culture (if not the whole world's) like a savage drug. Daniel's quest for and ultimate attainment of recognition for his gifts is both remarkable and disturbing. It is remarkable for the fact that Daniel himself began documenting his curious life and habits at an early age - video taping his odd creative style, his tumultuous relationship with his put-upon parents, and even staged fantastical dramas that often had him playing the role of his worried, nagging mother, complete with full house coat drag. His ambition is likewise unsettling, as he seems to have been entirely unconcerned with or even thrilled with any of his glaring shortcomings. Like the talentless and delusional victims that flock to that annual ritualistic bloodletting that is the auditions for "American Idol", Daniel at times seemed to be offering himself up as a sacrificial lamb, to be ridiculed and scorned, for the simple amusement of a smug, careless audience. It subtly reveals that there may be more than a hint of madness in those of us who so desperately desire fame, and equally in all the rest of us who so passionately worship it. Deny this fact at your own peril.Fortunately, thanks to the deft, sensitive skill of its director, this tale is neither an obsequious paean to an under appreciated talent, nor a bleak, nihilistic rant on the futility of man's vanity. Rather, it turns out to be a modest celebration of the triumph of the creative spirit - that force that drives artists to fully express their soul, more deeply connect with their fellow life voyagers, and unselfishly share those simple mysterious truths that we so easily overlook, forget, or deny. Daniel's songs are excavated from the deepest, most secret depths of his soul and emerge into the light of day as delicate, innocent bundles of magic, exploding into our psyches in fantastical color, form and sound. It's exhilarating to witness the birth and delivery of his remarkable creations. Even if it's in a dingy, cramped room of only 10 or 20 enlightened fans, the performances feel more like sacred oblations on behalf of the whole of humanity.This film is a modest declaration for us all to be more aware, more tolerant, more humane to those individuals among us who answer to rare, alien masters, even if these same artists are not always so careful with themselves. The simplicity, the honesty, the magic of Daniel Johnston's art and music is bittersweet proof that the world has not seen its last Van Gogh. These exceptional artists, like Daniel Johnston, have something significant, something essential, something beautiful for us all.

Sorry folks there is no genius in Daniel Johnston. As an illustrator he's got some talent. Genius no. There was one or more of those in the colleges I attended. Even better. Musically he's a hack. His writing is immature at best. And his singing is uncontrolled noise. To subject an audience to this kind of mumble jumble and try to pull it off as genius in insulting. By the end I didn't even feel sorry for him. I'm glad he has parents that are supportive and caring. But lets call it what it is. A bi-polar uncontrolled somewhat talented man who may have been a good artist if he were stable enough to be disciplined. Just because you cut off your ear doesn't make you a Van Gogh.