The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005)

The Daniel Johnston is a sad story. The artist beaten by a mental illness, a victim of his own demons and destroyed by unrequited love. He achieved his goal of becoming famous after appearing on MTV program, but from that moment, an emotional shock that he would never put back (the woman he was always in love with another man undertook) detonated a manic depressive mental disorder already spent years brewing inside.
For years he combined his cassette recordings and drawings, with hospital visits, performances and meetings with bands like Sonic Youth and Jad Fair showed their admiration for him, but always under the shadow of his mental instability. Its extreme Christianity took obsessed with the figure of Satan and were multiple references and addresses your figure both in their actions and in the home recordings.
Jeff Feuerzeig builds a delicate but painful documentary work through a collection of 10 years of all the material kept Daniel in his basement studio. Films in which not only recorded his songs or his ideas, but also fights with her mother, who appears in his teenage years as an authoritarian figure almost shuns their artistic vein. Also the videos that rolled with his brother, his little Super 8 films and a lot of characters and illustrations containing constant elements of his inner world as Captain America, eyeballs, the figure of the devil, torsos of naked women or heads open. All images in the documentary wrapped his songs, sad allegations to the fragility of Daniel, who just displayed as actual testimony provided through their letters and diaries narrated on cassette.
The documentary also includes testimonials from people close to the musician from the beginning and in every moment of its decline. His parents, who star in the most emotional moments of the film in tears telling her psychotic episodes most problematic (leakage without notice or plane crash), but also speak proudly of their achievements and the fruits of their creativity as an artist. His manager, probably the most important of his career, one more victim of his mental instability, who left her side after many years of work just before clinching a record relevant. Her friend Kathy McCarthy, who speaks of him with a mixture of pity and tenderness. Friends, journalists and musicians who lived a musical heyday in Austin, a city that encunó the rise of a young artist become a unique folk tune pitched voice.
No wonder that all this emotional fragility to the attention of another tormented as Kurt Cobain, who looked at photos and performances the shirt with the cover of Hi, How Are You, forming a legion of onlookers who, over time, is become his most loyal followers.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a magnificent piece documentary that traces all over the story of a prolific artist, with ups and downs, harsh episodes (as in breaking to mourn at a concert to the amazement of the audience) and other endearing (when he meets Matt Groening in his dressing room), and it reaches its most shocking moment in the last section showing the relationship 'present' of Daniel with his parents, and older, who care for him and fear that day in which they are no longer the artist and stability wobble.