Ahoy, squirts! Quint here to present MiraJeff and his musings on documentary THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON. I've heard nothing but the very biggest of raves for this flick and MiraJeff joins the chorus of praise below. Enjoy!
Greetings AICN, MiraJeff here to finally rejoice in the splendor that is Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. The trailer again boasts the proud stamp of Ain’t It Cool News, who calls it “this year’s must-see” and I am here to echo that sentiment. This is a brilliant film about a brilliant man who has led a truly amazing life as a manic-depressive singer-songwriter and gifted artist. Since seeing the movie about two months ago, I have been listening to Daniel Johnston’s music non-stop. Some of it is beautiful and some of it isn’t very pretty at all, but each and every song is simply fascinating. And to think, I didn’t have a clue about this guy before the film’s trailer popped up over on Apple. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is at once terrifying, hilarious, and profoundly moving. I found myself crying on more than one occasion, but then again, I’m a big ole pussy. The film is simply a marvel to watch, completely engrossing from start to finish thanks to Daniel, who seems to relish being in the spotlight, as if was born to have this film made about his life. Dare I say even Dave Eggers would consider this film a heartbreaking work of staggering genius? But I digress.
We open on Daniel videotaping himself in Austin, 1985, explaining his “condition” to his imaginary audience. Wearing his dapper McDonalds uniform, he tells us he is the ghost of Daniel Johnston. An eerie quote appears on screen, foreshadowing Daniel’s rapidly-growing belief in later years that the Devil is after him.
Flash-forward to a 2001 performance in LA. Daniel, having aged 16 years and gained a considerable amount of weight, is still a mesmerizing performer, despite years of being under heavy medication. Interviews with his parents reveal that his mother knew when he was a boy that “Dan was different.” That is, Daniel was one of us- he was a geek. He never sat still, was obsessed with comic books, and made short films parodying his mother, including one particularly funny gem, “It Must Be Monday.” But once he got to junior high, he lost all his confidence, only had a couple friends, and was considered ‘weird’ for the most part. One especially imaginative and creative sequence set to “I Have Lost My Mind” gives us an animated tour of Daniel’s teenage sketchpad, where he constantly drew pictures of eyeballs and a man with a sawed-off head. We see Daniel in college where he meets Laurie, the love of his life who would inspire 1000 songs. Sadly however, she’s dating an undertaker, and becomes an unattainable conquest, although Daniel’s own best friend admits that “he had to chase and never catch. He wanted to pine.” Feuerzeig even allows us to view Daniel as he watches a videotape of Laurie and reminisces about how “art has always been inspired by beauty because art is the greatest frame of mind to express a certain feeling.” The sadness we see in this man’s face and hear in his voice is indescribable. After suffering pains of longing, we follow Daniel as his mental illness grows more apparent to the people around him. In typical Daniel Johnston fashion, he disappears on a moped and joins a carnival, working as a corndog vendor, although that seems like too glorious a title.
In September of 1983 he records Hi, How Are You on an organ semi-fashioned out of an old weightlifting bench and goes on to win awards at the 1983 Austin Music Festival for Best Songwriter and Best Folk Artist, ironic because he wasn’t considered by his peers to be a talented guitarist. By this time Daniel had a job cleaning tables at McDonald’s, which required the least amount of responsibility, even less than the retards manning the fry-o-later. Record labels and reporters from Spin start calling the fast-food joint to reach Daniel, all necessary measures in a pre-cell phone world. Of course, they could always check out MTV, where Daniel had finagled his way on air and become a regular personality, an underground sensation who was spreading like wildfire. One particularly touching scene shows Daniel giving his best friend, David, a shout-out. It’s the ultimate ‘We’ve Made It, Buddy’ moment captured in all its glory, and straight out of television history. Near the end of the film, David acknowledges that the stories about Daniel are mythic and barely believable, but he concedes, “They’re all true.” Friend Kathy McCarty describes Daniel as “leaving a wake of creation and destruction wherever he goes.” We’re given a glimpse into this sentiment through footage of a Johnston family Christmas which shows Daniel acting erratic and hanging bizarre ornaments on the tree before his family has to call the police to intervene. It sounds funny, but trust me, it’s tragic.
Inevitably, Daniel makes his way to New York City where he lives in a men’s shelter on the Bowery among the homeless and the hungry for two weeks. During this time he starts smoking pot, is physically abused, and takes a powerful hit of acid at a Butthole Surfers concert, which prompts him to hallucinate scenes of hell and Satan and begin believing in a supernatural world. In short, Daniel is not acting like himself, and Surfers front man Libby Barnes appears later in a bizarre interview conducted during his dentist appointment to touch upon this. It’s unclear why Feuerzeig favored this approach, and although earning points for its originality, just hearing the drill and seeing his Hills Have Eyes mutant-like teeth made my own mouth hurt. After the Butthole Surfers show, Daniel disappears and some members from Sonic Youth find him wandering around the parking lot of a New Jersey motel. While on his Big Apple adventure, he’s introduced to several musicians including Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker and Jad Fair of Half Japanese, who he later makes an album with. Unsurprisingly, Daniel gets sent to Bellevue Hospital for one day but is released due to a clerical error and performs at CBGB’s later that night. However it’s not long before he is arrested for defacing the Statue of Liberty with hundreds of drawings of Christian fish in one of the film’s more humorous scenes.
Daniel’s goal when he came to New York was to get famous and to an extent, he makes that happen. The sheer amount of archival footage Johnston contributes to Feuerzeig’s documentary attests to his long-standing belief that one day, he would eventually be famous, and the world would want and/or need to know about his audio recordings, garage tapes, and schoolboy scribbles. Early in the film, we’re told that as a boy, Daniel wanted to be John Lennon. Deep down, I think he always knew he could achieve something near that level of fame and critical acclaim just by being himself, and although it takes some prying, we do hear his parents compare him to Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, another misunderstood musical genius.
One particularly harrowing chapter in the film has Daniel’s father recounting one night after a concert when the two of them were flying in a two-man plane he owned. Daniel was reading a Casper comic book whose cover was a picture of Casper falling out of the sky with a parachute. Suddenly, Daniel takes the keys out of the ignition after a brief struggle with his father and throws them out the window. Again, this is a documentary folks, i.e. that’s friggin’ crazy. The film mentions that Daniel often thinks of himself as Casper and Captain America, but of course, he is no superhero, and he definitely didn’t have a parachute. Mr. Johnston cries as he recalls the plane beginning to free-fall as he fought to regain control. Obviously, they both survived that fateful day, but the plane crashed into some trees and was totaled. As if God saved Daniel and his father, the family sees a sign on a church promising a safe landing after a rocky voyage. It’s literally a sign from the heavens. Nonetheless, Daniel’s parents commit him to a mental institution for five months, where he learns the scriptures, falls in love with Mountain Dew, and tells Tartakov to contact people like Yoko Ono and the Pepsi Co. so he can be their spokesperson. Needless to say, they didn’t respond. The film also chronicles several violent episodes in Daniel’s life including a one-sided run-in with a gentleman at a port-o-potty, an incident in which Daniel broke into an elderly woman’s house and scared her so badly, she jumped out a 2nd story window to escape, breaking both of her ankles, culminating with a brutal assault against his former manager.
So what happened to Daniel Johnston? Well after firing long-time manager Jeff Tartakov, he signed with Atlantic Records and released his first studio-produced album called Fun! Unfortunately for Daniel, it only sold about 5800 copies. The label subsequently dropped him in 1996 after originally signing him (in a mental hospital no less) to one of the most important contracts in music for artist rights. In later years, his material is covered by close friend McCarty, whose eyeglasses he frequently draws. The film’s third act catches up with Daniel as he leads band practice at the Nightmare House, writing songs and providing lead vocals (not his best work, personally) for his band of star-struck twenty-somethings, Danny and the Nightmares. We’re also treated to a glimpse of a 2003 solo performance in Sweden, where Daniel’s melancholic spirit is warmly received. Besides boasting a fan base including Kurt Cobain and Harmony Korine, Simpsons creator Matt Groening also professes his appreciation for Daniel’s music in another small treasure of a scene. But although Daniel shares Lisa Simpson’s musical talent, he looks more like Barney, which is a shame, because beneath his average Joe exterior, lies a class clown’s lively eyes, sheepish smile, and winning spirit, which are all on display, front and center, in a telling shot of Daniel hovering over his parents in the front yard they share in the idyllic little town of Walker, Texas (Ranger?).
Today, Daniel’s back catalog can be ordered from Stress Records, which Tartakov still runs, although some of it is available on iTunes. The film’s third act also goes to great lengths to make Tartakov out to be a martyr, and ultimately he is a sympathetic figure, one of the few who believed in Daniel Johnston from the beginning. He was also one of the few who directly felt the impact of Daniel’s mental illness and Feuerzeig references Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose in portraying Tartakov as an old-school sort of manager, one who fought hard for his clients and was motivated by working with one of music’s most beautiful minds, not the almighty Dollar. The end credits roll as Daniel dances in an endearing fast-motion sequence that showcases him in his natural element -just dancing it, letting it all hang out. I think it’s refreshing for once, to see a documentary subject who doesn’t take himself so seriously. Hell, even Daniel admits he can’t remember some of his songs.
Time is an important theme in Daniel’s music, and it always seem that he thinks he’s running out of it. His lyrics worry that he’ll get a “flat tire on memory lane,” and that “something inside has gone up and died and I couldn’t write a song if I tried.” At one point in the film he says, “better to die young and live forever and that’s what I intend to do.” Daniel is intent on leaving behind a larger-than-life legacy and that is the reason that this film exists. Like Jonathan Caouette in Tarantion, it’s as if Daniel knew that one day the time would come to put all those photographs and video tapes and tape recordings to good use. Thank God he found someone like Feuerzeig to organize everything in a tight, well-structured, generation-spanning film. He does employ the use of a lot of voice-over narration, but this isn’t just a talking heads, interview-style documentary. It tells Daniel’s story in a genuinely affecting, compelling way. Personally, I envisioned Daniel as a manic-depressive folk hero, very much like Donnie Darko, but with the voice of an aged Conor Oberst, but hey, that’s just me.
I guarantee that this is one of the best documentaries you’ll see all year, if not one of the best films, period. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a masterpiece that will haunt you long after you’ve left the theater. If you’re not searching like a rabid animal for his songs online after seeing this film I’ll be surprised. My personal recommendation: “Story of An Artist,” a song whose lyric poetry makes me cry every time I hear it. Alright folks, I’m gonna wrap this one up. I’ve got reviews of Hard Candy and Haven coming up, plus a few words with Sir Ben Kingsley from the Lucky Number Slevin junket. ‘Til next time, this is MiraJeff signing off.
