After finagling a brief appearance on an early MTV show spotlighting the Austin music scene in 1985, Johnston became something of a local celebrity. In the local music press, he topped several year-end polls in the songwriting category. But Johnston was already starting to show signs of psychological instability in 1986, when he dropped acid, for the first time at a Butthole Surfers show and flipped out. Not long after, he beat his then-manager over the head with a pipe. The guy survived, but Johnston was institutionalized for the first time.
Over the next 20 years, Johnston, diagnosed as manic-depressive, would spend time in and out of institutions. In that period he’s hired and fired managers, turned down a lucrative major-label record deal with Electra (because the band Metallica, whom Johnson believed to be satanic, was on the label), signed a short-lived major-label record deal with Atlantic, and continued to make music. His favorite themes include the purity of true love and the evil of Satan.
Feuerzeig, a longtime Johnston fan, walks a potentially tricky line in “The Devil and Daniel Johnston.” There’s no getting around the fact that a large part of Johnston’s appeal is his fragility, a fragility that may be endearing to us but is actually dangerous to him. “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” includes footage from the numerous performances Johnston has given over the years. In nearly all of these performances (even his first, in Austin, where he took the stage before he barely knew how to play guitar) he is a natural performer. Johnston’s confidence shines through his jittery awkwardness. His voice may be quaking, but he looks out at the audience as if he were a conqueror; as if the stage were the only place he could live the life he was destined to live.
But in some of these performances, Johnston’s strained, rambling patter is distressing. We know we’re watching a human being unraveling. Feuerzeig has to include footage like that if he’s going to tell Johnston’s story honestly, and he does so without being exploitive. You get the sense that he’s always cutting away at just the right moment; favoring on the side of showing us too little rather than too much.
Feuerzeig doesn’t blame Bill and Mabel Johnston, Daniel’s parents, for all, or any, of his problems. Feuerzeig devotes a great deal of time to Johnston’s parents, who are now, even in their old age, Daniel’s chief caretakers. Although they don’t dwell on it, they clearly worry about what will happen to their son when they are gone, and their anxious sense of responsibility toward him is heartbreaking. And while Feuerzeig doesn’t ignore their Christian fundamentalism, he doesn’t use it as a scapegoat, either. He clearly has enough respect for the seriousness of Johnston’s emotional problems to know that they couldn’t have been caused, or even necessarily aggravated, by bible-thumping.
But Feuerzeig’s sympathy for his subject is never in doubt. He’s concerned mostly with piecing together Johnston’s story, talking extensively with the people who have been closest to him over the years, among them Thornberry and McCarty. Thornberry’s comments are particularly touching, largely because he’s not afraid to joke around and wisecrack. He talks about the day Johnston first appeared at his high school. He was “the new art guy, the new art star,” and Thornberry had to meet him. Without ever downplaying Johnston’s problems, Thornberry never loses sight of the man as a human being. McCarty, whose 1994 album “Dead Dog’s Eyeball” is a collection of Johnston covers, is similarly realistic about her friend. We learn late in the picture that McCarty and Thornberry are married. They are living the sort of life that Johnston can’t, and yet without him, they never would have met.
And then there’s the extensive footage, much of it vintage but some of it contemporary, of Johnston himself. The Johnston of the ‘80s is a wiry kid with a quavery, cartoon-character voice. He doesn’t come off as particularly odd, just maybe the sort of guy who’s eaten far too much sugarcoated cereal in his lifetime. His eyes have a mischievous, distracted gleam. The older Johnston is far more low-key and looks as if too much of the life has been knocked out of him. He’s bloated and heavy-set, possibly from all the medication he takes.
But when Johnston is onstage, he’s as self-possessed as ever, temporarily becoming the person that fate, or whatever it was that hit him, prevented him from being. He may be a rock ‘n’ roll footnote in real life, but in his mind, and in the minds of thousands of fans, he’s a rock star.
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