The Devil and Daniel Johnston

I first heard about Daniel Johnston through Yo La Tengo. I bought a 7″ record that features sleeve art by Johnston. The recording is simple: Yo La Tengo calls Johnston at his home and asks him to sing “Speeding Motorcycle” into the phone while they play along in their studio. His voice, thin and raspy to begin with, sounds tiny and hurt as it comes through the receiver. But he sings with a lot of emotion and gets carried away. And if you look at the sleeve art while listening to the record, you pretty much get who Johnston is. It’s a drawing of him on stage strumming his guitar and singing “Speeding Motorcycle” with an adoring crowd cheering him on. The documentary sticks with this idea:

Johnston is an extremely talented, extremely ambitious guy. At an early age he decides he’s going to be famous, and there’s nothing that’s going to stop him from realizing this dream. He ends up in Austin at just the right time: the mid-1980s. And immediately he becomes a local darling. It just so happens that MTV is filming an all-Austin episode of “Cutting Edge,” and Johnston steals the show. If this was anybody else’s story (with Johnston’s talent and ambition), it would just get better from here on out: recording contract, tours, critical acclaim, increasing artistic control and maturity, and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. But Johnston simply goes out of his mind. He’s consumed by images of Satan, and his paranoid delusions send him off on wild, destructive rants. We learn of a bad acid trip at a Butthole Surfers concert, an incident where he nearly kills his manager. For fans, these are not big revelations. Johnston’s mental illness is no secret. The amazing thing is that it is all documented. The filmmakers were given access to all of Johnston’s tape recordings (including a bizarre recording of his mother shouting at him, a recording that reminds me of Murry Wilson’s berating of his son Brian during the “Help Me, Rhonda” sessions). There’s original MTV footage, Johnston’s home movies, photographs.

And the filmmakers handle all this material very well. Their interviews with Johnston’s friends, parents, fellow artists, are all informative and insightful. What’s most striking about this film is that Johnston himself is not interviewed. He makes only a few small appearances. And though it’s no surprise to see that Johnston is now a slouchy, unkempt chain smoker with an amazing belly, it’s still a shock. Because the young Daniel Johnston is so beautiful, and there’s so much promise. But the madness is just so overwhelming. And this is really what the film is about. But the other story about Johnston, the one that’s told in the little 7″ record and sleeve, still shines through: a kid with great little songs about love and pain will stop at nothing to be up on stage in front of adoring fans.