Channel 4 (UK) Documentaries

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005x99)

Air date: Jan 01, 2005

Daniel Johnston entered the wider public consciousness when Nirvana's Kurt Cobain appeared at the 1992 MTV awards wearing a Daniel Johnston T-shirt featuring a line drawing of a frog-like creature with eyeballs on stalks and the slogan "Hi, how are you?". It was the artwork from a demo tape Johnston had made in his bedroom as a teenager in the early 1980s. The son of respectable, middle-class Christian parents from Texas, the precocious Daniel gets heavily into music, comic books, home movies and a girl called Laurie. These might seem like the staples of any American adolescence, but as he shoots to fame via MTV and the fledgling grunge scene, he begins to lose his grip on reality and finds himself heading for manic depression, drug use, violence, religious fanaticism and a life spent in and out of mental institutions.