Outsider artists, and the strange and disturbing life story of Daniel Johnston

Jeff Feuerzeig's 2005 documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, is another documentary about an outsider artist - an ever-intriguing little subgenre of 21st-century American film - in this case a man from West Virginia who spent his time in high school making frenetic and whimsical Super8 films, engaging in comic-book art, and composing antic songs influenced to a degree by the greats of his (and our) time, notably Dylan and the Beatles. Throughout h.s. his behavior became increasingly erratic and eccentric, passing from creative and witty to strange and obsessed. He passed through a few colleges, eventually left school, drifted to Austin, Texas, which adopted him as part of its punk music scene. He was at the right place, right time - his work was punk in its nascent days and punk to the extreme. He can't sing at all, his guitar playing is primitive, his musical compositions are OK but definitely garage-band and not complex or terribly original, his lyrics are strange and full of his odd obsessions (some comic-book based - he was drawn to Casper the Friendly Ghost - some religious, with rants about Satan). On stage he was so bad yet so earnest that he seemed a perfect emblem for the amateur and rough nature of punk; audiences, at least in Austin, went wild for him, and he drew attention from MTV, and then agents, etc. - but his behavior became increasingly erratic, leading to hospitalizations, several arrests, lots of medication. At the time of the film, he is heavily medicated, not writing music any longer, in horrible physical condition, but focusing on his comic-cartoon-influenced artwork, which sells for substantial sums. In most ways it's a very sad movie, as this Johnston is seriously mentally ill and harms many people, including himself. We never, or at least I never, sensed that he was or could have been a great artist; a # of his songs have been covered by other artists - notably Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, Flaming Lips (you can see how these guys would be drawn to this kind of outsider music art) - but there is no way his opus can compare w/ the great songwriters of our time (despite efforts in the film to compare him w/ the similarly afflicted Brian Wilson). More closely, he's something like the William Hung phenomenon of some years back - so bad he's almost good, along with the sense that the audience is uneasily aware of his naivete and fragile mental state. The film may remind some of the excellent Marwencol, about an outsider artist w/ a similar fascination, or obsession, with an impossible love.