Dealing with demons

THE devil has a thousand faces. Alongside hair-raising renditions by Renaissance painters stand the reasonable, even cordial Prince of Darkness of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential play “No Exit” and the aloof yet magnetic personage of Mark Twain’s short story “The Mysterious Stranger”-- an angel named Satan who takes great pleasure in deriding man and his self-set standards of good and evil.

The new documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” adds another visage to the roster. Of the twin protagonists, Johnston is the lesser known, although he’s become something of a cult hero over the last couple of decades. He’s a West Virginia-bred musician and artist whose naive-sophisticate output ranges from lo-fi folk-punk ditties delivered in an adolescent croak, to album art and felt-tip pen drawings featuring his alter-egos (Casper the Friendly Ghost and Captain America) battling demonic forces.

Such was the pull of his early work that he came to be embraced by pop-culture icons such as Kurt Cobain and “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening even as Johnston’s lifelong struggle with mental illness deepened and his creative engine sputtered.

To dramatize the arc of Johnston’s journey, filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig created a documentary that blends reportage with storytelling devices usually found in feature films. “I conceived it as a three-act screenplay,” he says. “The devil is the antagonist, and you meet him at the end of Act 1. The rest is Daniel’s battle -- he calls it ‘the eternal battle’ -- with him.”

Feuerzeig, 41, whose film won him the best documentary director honor at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, was drawn into Johnston’s story by a radio special featuring songs and comedy skits that the musician staged from the ward of a mental hospital in 1990. “After that show was over, I said to myself, if I could make a film of it -- showing Johnston’s songs, his highs, his lows, his manias, his obsession with fame, his obsession with the devil, his fragile beauty, his innocence.... If I could get all of that into a film -- I thought, wow, that would be one hell of a film!”

The project germinated for several years and took shape when Feuerzeig trekked to Wallard, Texas, in the middle of “God and fast-food” country, where Johnston, now 45, shares a home with his aging parents. In a moldy closet, the filmmaker found an oversized garbage bag filled with treasures: homemade films that Johnston had directed and starred in as a teenager and myriad cassette tapes on which, from early boyhood onward, Johnston had documented his life.

The audio vignettes ranged from domestic drama scenes featuring his mother scolding him to intimate audio journal entries and his own arrest, years later, for doodling hundreds of “Jesus fish” onto the walls of the Statue of Liberty. Feuerzeig spent 4 1/2 years transcribing and digitizing the material and used it to write a script that augments traditional documentary sources -- interview footage, photographs and memorabilia -- with re-creations of the past. The film is scored with Johnston’s own inner monologue, and features cinema and audio verite moments, subjective camera point-of-view shots, comic-book drawings and animation.

“There’s been great films made about mad artists before -- this isn’t the first one,” the filmmaker says. “But it is the first documentary where we get to go on the journey of a mad artist through their own self-documentation. You couldn’t make a film about Vincent van Gogh like this, or even about John Lennon -- the material doesn’t exist. They didn’t document themselves; Daniel did.”

Feuerzeig fished for inspiration in sources as disparate as Errol Morris’ and Woody Allen’s work (notably the latter’s “Take the Money and Run” and “Zelig” faux-docs) and a 1993 book, “Touched With Fire,” in which psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison builds a persuasive case for the preponderance of manic-depressive disorders among artists. Feuerzeig included an hommage to Jamison’s thesis in his film: A scrapbook of stately photographs of noted troubled artists (Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath and theater of cruelty godfather Antonin Artaud) concludes with a snapshot of Daniel Johnston dressed for work at McDonald’s -- the only steady job he’s ever been able to hold.

The filmmaker argues that his subject belongs in such company, a belief he says is based on the outpouring of enthusiasm for Johnston’s work, especially among young Gen Y-ers.

“They’re passing his tapes and his drawings around like a copy of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ or ‘On the Road,’ ” Feuerzeig says. “Daniel is Holden Caulfield and Sal Paradise -- he really did run away on a moped and joined the carnival and traveled through the Midwest. And kids -- the new generation -- are cherishing that. Daniel Johnston is their Bob Dylan.”

Comparisons to Dylan and to Brian Wilson -- another artist with a noted history of mental illness -- appear in the film, and they have caused some critics to cry heresy. In one of the doc’s most arresting segments, an animated sequence based on a recurring Johnston character -- a homunculus with the top of his head sliced off -- is scored by a song called “I Have Lost My Mind.” The simple tune and half-spoken delivery are positively Dylan-esque, and other Johnston tracks that feature couplets like “Do yourself a favor / Be your own savior” uncannily resurrect a young Dylan’s mix of wisdom, petulance and sincerity.

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The wizard behind the curtain?

IF Daniel Johnston has something in common with Dylan, it’s less an unquenchable talent than a deft self-mythologizing touch. From his youth he seems to have understood that his affliction could propel his legend. During his first appearance on MTV in spring 1985 -- on a taping of “The Cutting Edge” show -- he promoted his album by noting that “it was recorded while I was having a nervous breakdown.” Adds Feuerzeig, “He’s drawn hundreds of drawings of the devil pulling his strings as a puppet master. But -- you know, who drew it? He did! So he is his own puppet master; he exploited his own mental illness. He’s the wizard behind his own curtain.”

In the last few years, Johnston’s fame has spread, bringing art shows in galleries and higher prices for his work. His drawings are even included in the current Whitney Biennial. “He’s one of these outsiders that managed to make a significant impression on a lot of insiders,” says Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, who became acquainted with Johnston in the mid-’80s and later recorded versions of Johnston songs. “He kind of sprang forth as a fully formed persona, and he hasn’t really changed much since then.”

Another constant has been his obsession with warding off demonic influences. “The devil, to Daniel Johnston, is very, very real,” Feuerzeig says.

Raised in the Church of Christ by loving but strict parents (his father, Bill, is a former World War II pilot; his mother, Mabel, a homemaker), Johnston defied their expectations to lead a “productive, not self-absorbed life” and embarked instead on a rambling existence to pursue music and art-making.

Planting roots in Austin, Texas, he shot to underground prophet status in the mid-1980s thanks to a collection of homemade cassette albums with titles like “Hello, How Are You?” and “Yep: Junk Music” that he tirelessly peddled to the local music press.

Swift success came, but it was marred by Johnston’s declining mental health and violent episodes, possibly set off by his reluctance to take his prescribed medication. The film traces how, during separate hallucinatory fits, he caused his father’s plane to crash and stormed into the apartment of an elderly woman, forcing her to jump out the window. He’s in stable yet feeble condition, but over the years he’s spent time in numerous mental institutions, including New York City’s Bellevue Hospital (whence, we learn in the film, he was released because of a clerical error. Later that same day, he took the stage at New York’s CBGB nightclub). Obsessed since boyhood with fame and “being on MTV,” he eventually released a record on a major label.

In piecing together the tale, Feuerzeig balanced tragic episodes with moments that are undeniably funny, like an audio letter Johnston sent to his manager from Weston Mental Hospital in West Virginia: “I wish that the Beatles would reunite and back me up.” During that same stint, he composed jingles that he wanted to submit to the makers of Mountain Dew, and a monologue in which he praises the virtues of his favorite beverage.

“They tell me I’m crazy because I like Mountain Dew so much,” he intones with perfectly ironic inflection, launching into a cheerful jingle and a comedic bit about “The best -- the greatest -- the most sensational soda pop in the cosmic universe!” which melts into a raising incantation about demons drinking Mountain Dew. The audio testimony is both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Mainstreaming an artist like Johnston does present a host of ethical questions. Sonic Youth guitarist Ranaldo, for example, judges the inclusion of Johnston’s drawings at the Whitney Biennial “a little bit sensationalistic.” “I don’t think they really chose the best pieces or honored them in the best way,” he says. “It’s kind of like -- he’s of the moment, so they threw him into the show.” Ranaldo himself shot footage that ended up in the film, which includes Johnston breaking down and raving about demons and numerology during a record store performance.

“He’s a bit cracked,” Ranaldo says, “and part of what we like about what he does has to do with this cracked nature of him. There’s a certain voyeuristic quality about it -- watch somebody be a train wreck, in a way.”

But Feuerzeig rejects accusations of exploitation. “Art doesn’t hurt anybody,” he says. “I don’t believe that filmmaking or art has any boundaries; as long as you’re trying to seek a deeper truth there should be no taboos.”

“It’s been a very delicate dance from the beginning,” acknowledges the film’s producer, Harry S. Rosenthal, who funded the $1-million project himself. “Daniel was difficult to work with, because he’s mentally ill. His level of cooperation fluctuated greatly. And Daniel’s family also had to be handled very delicately, and at various stages they needed to be ... persuaded to stay with the project.”

Johnston’s reaction to the finished work? “He came up to me and told me, ‘I loved the colors,’ ” Feuerzeig says. “In his own film, he remains an enigma. I don’t feel like I know him any better than when I first met him, 4 1/2 years ago. We can only know Daniel Johnston through his art and his music -- and maybe that’s the way it should be.”