accessAtlanta

'The Devil and Daniel Johnston' paints a haunting portrait

Musician and artist Daniel Johnston has had plenty of famous admirers — including "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening and Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, who wore Johnston's trademark "Hi How Are You" T-shirt at the 1992 MTV Music Awards.

Recently, Mary Lou Lord's cover of Johnston's cracked ditty "Speeding Motorcycle" was featured in a Target commercial. And currently 14 of Johnston's unsettling, cartoonish drawings (with titles such as "Die Satan Die" and "It's a Nightmare") are on display at the Whitney Museum's 2006 Biennial in New York City.

Sony Pictures Classics 'The Devil and Daniel Johnston' A- The verdict: A haunting, darkly humorous documentary about the manic depressive musician and artist. Director: Jeff Feuerzeig Cast: Daniel Johnston, Mabel Johnston, Bill Johnston, Kathy McCarty, Jeff Tartakov Run time: 110 minutes Release date: March 31, 2006 Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, drug content, and language including a sexual reference. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime [an error occurred while processing this directive]

You don't need to know all that to appreciate "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" — director Jeff Feuerzeig's haunting, darkly humorous history of the harrowing life and times of Johnston, who has suffered from manic depression since he was a teenager. But it does help. And after hearing Johnston's stuttering warble and peripatetic guitar playing, you still may come away wondering who's more deluded, the troubled singer-songwriter or his adoring fans?

Feuerzeig is clearly a Johnston enthusiast. And he may be guilty of hyping Johnston's talents. One imaginative animated sequence in the film flips through a picture book of tetched geniuses — Byron, Van Gogh, Virginia Wolfe, Sylvia Plath — slyly adding one more: Johnston.

But Feuerzeig rarely blinks when it comes to the sad and scary details of Johnston's mental illness — which range from long bouts when he rarely left his fundamentalist parents' basement to stints working at McDonald's, being locked away in hospitals and deranged assaults on both strangers and friends, including his long-suffering manager. Then there's the time he wrested control of his father's small airplane, sending it plummeting into a tree.

None of those pathological particulars would be of very much interest, though, if Johnston, now 45, hadn't been writing and recording music and drawing pictures for more than 25 years. Or if he hadn't wandered, beaten, from a carnival job and wound up on the streets of Austin, Texas, in the early 1980s, during the heyday of alternative rock. That's when he started passing out his peculiar homemade cassette tapes with his quirky art on the covers. And members of Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Half Japanese and other bands became enamored of Johnston's primitive, lo-fi style and exuberant, naive lyrics.

Feuerzeig was able to fashion such a thorough, engaging film partly because aficionados such as Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth shot so much footage of Johnston performing and acting out. But Feuerzeig also had access to Johnston's own archive of Super 8 movies, artwork and tapes containing all sorts of surreptitiously recorded conversations.

What emerges are compelling sounds and images of the convoluted journey of a tortured soul. Not an artist on par with a Byron or Van Gogh — or even Brian Wilson (whom Johnston is often compared with by his devotees). But a person who has transformed his pain into poignant observations and reflections and some measure of fame.

As the Whitney Biennial catalog puts it: "Johnston's art and songwriting are parallel and interconnected expressions of his psyche that resound with fundamental human longings and struggles."

Feuerzeig's documentary does that, too.