#24 - The Devil and Daniel Johnston

The Devil and Daniel Johnston tells the story of the titular Daniel Johnston - music's eternal outsider - as he ascends to (niche) fame and descends into a spiral of mania, Christian fanaticism, and mental breakdowns, constantly producing reams of drawings and stacks of cassette tapes of music.  Johnston himself, though he is still alive and (relatively) well, is elusive and at times opaque, and so the story is told through the words of family and friends, over the soundtrack of his musical recordings, which are simple and yet haunting.

Though the film gets off to a rocky start by describing Johnston's fairly unremarkable childhood, the story quickly picks up to the point where it would be impossible to create something uninteresting about this man.  Johnston - and his illness - is fairly presented: he seems at times to be the mythical figure, the childlike mad genius in his world of delusions, unreachable and prone to outbursts, but always cutting through the mystique is Johnston's sardonic self-awareness.  There is a great story here, and the production team were successful in finding the right people to tell it and to bring it out, and in showing us, gently, the strange and at times wonderful contents of Johnston's teeming mind.

And yet I wonder - if this story is so perfectly cinematic, why didn't anyone think to make cinema out of it?  When so many scenes, excellently articulated, would be fantastic to see acted out by a talented cast, this documentary's choice of sort of 'reenactments' (where we inhabit a camera as it supposedly follows Johnston's footsteps into the settings of the film's events) not only fall flat but seem almost disrespectful to Johnston's life in their sensationalism.  But if the team weren't going to find actors to actually bring these scenes to life, it should have remained as it was without the reenactment scenes: a collection of interviews (and tape recordings and archival footage) that present reality as it actually was, not as a lurid tabloid fantasy.  And at the times when The Devil and Daniel Johnston sticks to reality, it is solid and painfully, gorgeously true.