The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Director: Jeff Feuerzeig
Year Released: 2005
Rating: 2.5
Indie oddity Daniel Johnston has his life examined by director Feuerzeig, who dug through Johnston's diary cassettes and super-8 footage to make this year's Portrait of an Artistic Screw-Up. It's hard accepting Johnston as a musical genius - I don't know about anyone else, but it seems like many of these 'outsider artists' and fringe acts are automatically deemed 'remarkable' based solely on their un-marketability and quirk factor - and when the film talks about all the acid and other drugs he did, you sort-of figure those were the pieces that took an already shaky personality and pushed him over the threshold into madness. Feuerzeig's 'recreations' are a little excessive, and there's this nagging feeling of exploitation running under the surface, but his film does touch on some important points about the artistic process: the need for support from people already 'established' to develop an audience (Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and Nirvana helped tremendously with the entire 'cult mystique') and the importance of a muse for an artist (here, a woman Daniel loved and lost).
