Mad geniuses?

In my amateur-songwriter second life, I often find myself consciously avoiding confessional language and reverting to the observational, sometimes the abstract. The reason is simple: My life is for the most part blessedly ordinary.

Daniel Johnston, meanwhile, claims to have written 100 songs, maybe more, about a single person — Laurie Allen, an art college friend whom he never dated, never kissed and yet passionately loves today from a decidedly impersonal distance. (He is now 45 and living under the care of his elderly parents.)

Daniel Johnston suffers from severe bipolar disorder and functions with the help of anti-psychotic drugs. He receives second billing to the antagonist in a fascinating documentary film about his life, “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” because, in the words of filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig, “The devil is very real to him.”

Mr. Feuerzeig calls the documentary, which opens today in area theaters, “a journey through madness and creativity.” The twinning of those elements, he says, is an old story, as old as — and integral to — art itself.

For Mr. Feuerzeig, Daniel Johnston is the paradigmatic “troubled genius” — the artist who suffers for his craft, the acutely sensitive soul whose inspiration and creativity depend on some excruciating clash between internal demons and everyday reality.

A short list of the troubled geniuses of pop music — they’re typically found in, but aren’t limited to, the singer-songwriter genre — might include Nick Drake (a suicide), Kurt Cobain (ditto) and Tim Buckley (dead of a heroin overdose at 28). Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, although they weren’t pure singer-songwriters, are spoken of with the same mixture of pity and awe reserved for the troubled genius.

With the recent DVD release of a documentary (Margaret Brown’s “Be Here to Love Me”) about another such troubled genius, the late singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, it’s worth exploring whether “genius” necessarily depends on a “troubled” soul.

In the several years he spent researching “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” Mr. Feuerzeig found historical confirmation of the troubled genius thesis in Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.”

“It’s the exact same thing with all artists,” he says. “It’s no different for Daniel. Manic depression — it just happens to be an inarguable phenomenon that many artists seem to have it. You can Google the list right now. It’s daunting. They all suffered. Why is that? I don’t know.”

Among the manic-depressive artists whom Miss Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, mentions in her book are: the painter Vincent van Gogh; the novelist-suicides Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf; and the opium-addicted poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Those unfamiliar with Mr. Johnston’s music may, on first listen, scoff at the suggestion that he belongs in such illustrious company. A do-it-yourself artist of the most unrefined order (he records mostly alone in a home studio on piano or guitar), Mr. Johnston’s pitch-challenged voice and slapdash musicianship may strike the average music fan as eccentrically amateurish at best, an unlistenable train wreck at worst.

My own reaction to it was, first, puzzlement, followed gradually by beguilement. Quite simply, I found Mr. Johnston’s songs, as captured in Mr. Feuerzeig’s vast archival footage, impossible to turn away from, even if I wanted to. They are not amateurish so much as innocent; not silly so much as pleasantly bizarre. Their emotional rawness and fragility is their very point.

Mr. Johnston is a hopeless Beatles fanatic, and while he lacks the innate talent of a Lennon or a McCartney, he has a way with melody and a darkly powerful plainspoken lyric sense.

Mr. Feuerzeig likens the fascination and suspense of Mr. Johnston’s work to a “circus high-wire act.”

“Is he gonna fall, or is he gonna make it?” wonders the filmmaker. “To me, that’s art. It’s a breath of fresh air. That’s something we don’t get in our homogenized, commodified culture.”

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