"The Devil and Daniel Johnston"

This sprawling, affectionate documentary captures the fragile spirit of a folk phenomenon who inspired performers like Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Daniel Johnston

March 31, 2006 | At their best, the songs of self-made pop phenomenon Daniel Johnston are distillations of everything we love about pop music, folk-art fantasias in which out-of-control motorcycles serve as metaphors for the heart's unpredictability and navigating love's confusion is likened to walking a cow on a leash. Johnston is a reclusive, astonishingly prolific singer-songwriter and visual artist who insinuated himself into the Austin, Texas, pop-music scene in the early '80s and went on to become a cult figure among musicians and pop-music fans through the dozens of homemade cassette tapes he recorded, and tirelessly distributed, over the next decade or so. The tapes' titles range from the piercingly direct ("Songs of Pain") to the disarmingly cheerful ("Hi, How Are You"); their covers are adorned with whimsical line drawings of strutting naked baby-men, or Martian frog creatures with quizzical round eyeballs perched on the ends of long antennae.

The tapes look and sound deceptively unsophisticated: Johnston has the kind of voice that drives some people crazy, a passionate parakeet's warble that wavers in and out of tune according to its own weird harmonic logic. But the songs themselves, which have been championed (and sometimes covered) by the likes of Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and Kurt Cobain, are sometimes difficult to listen to for another reason: They're so nervously alive that it's hard to distance yourself from the fragile soul who wrote them. Johnston's pulse beats so close to the surface that its thrumming is sometimes difficult to bear.

That's the quality Jeff Feuerzeig seeks to capture -- and often does, very effectively -- in his sprawling, affectionate documentary "The Devil and Daniel Johnston." As its title suggests, the picture is something of a ballad, an ode to an elusive character who's both quintessentially human and so outlandish he almost seems unreal.

Johnston, now in his mid-40s, grew up in a family of Christian fundamentalists in New Cumberland, Va. He was a precocious teenager who spent much of his time drawing wild cartoons (disembodied, floating eyeballs have always been a favorite subject) and making clever little home movies with his older brother: In scratchy clips from these old Super 8's, we see Johnston playing dual roles, as himself and his mother, who, in her hair curlers and housecoat, harangues him mercilessly and feeds him a green Kool-Aid concoction for breakfast.

Johnston had a room in the family basement that he turned into a mini-archive of comic books, magazines and record albums, a kind of fallout shelter for a pop survivalist. (The room he lives in as an adult, in his parents' current home in Waller, Texas, is a re-creation of that earlier bunker.) As a teenager, Johnston recorded his thoughts and feelings onto cassette tapes; later, accompanying himself on rudimentary-sounding keyboards, he would turn those ruminations into painfully direct and heartfelt songs, which he would copy and distribute, with the zeal of a wheeler-dealer record exec, to friends and strangers alike.

Johnston was a smart, creative kid who somehow lost his footing on the way to adulthood. His mother, distressed by his wild drawings and even wilder imagination, tried to goad him into respectability, calling him "an unprofitable servant of the Lord." (Johnston's lifelong best friend, an articulate and astute artist and poet named David Thornberry, recalled that Johnston responded by calling himself "an unserviceable prophet of the Lord.") After high school, Johnston ran off and joined a carnival without telling his parents or siblings of his whereabouts. Forced to quit that gig -- apparently, he was beaten up by a carny thug for hogging a Porta-potty -- he found his way to Austin, where he landed a job cleaning tables at a McDonald's. There, he fell in with a group of local musicians, among them singer Kathy McCarty, who came to recognize the extraordinary but rather delicate nature of his talent.

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