“Is that Big Bird?” the woman waiting asks, perplexed by the strange, high-pitched voice coming through the speakers in the coffee shop. The voice is Daniel Johnston’s, as is the music accompanying it—a crudely-made home recording of clanging toy organ and tape hiss set to the persistent tempo of the artist’s tapping foot. She could be forgiven for confusing a man whom some consider one of the best songwriters of his generation for a denizen of Sesame Street.

There’s something unmistakably child-like about Daniel Johnston’s songs. The words and notes come unexpectedly, as if they might be as fresh a discovery to the man singing them as they are for anyone who happens to be listening. Like all good children’s stories, they contain elements both enchanting and frightening, but even the happy sentiments are tinged with a very adult kind of pain.

“When we all become famous in the sky
We’ll have no reason to doubt or wonder why
There will be whip cream toppings on our piece of pie
When we all become famous in the sky
I see no dang reason to be sad
I’m so dang happy I could cry
We’ll be long since remembered after we die
When we all become famous in the sky”

The woman wrinkles her brow in vague bemusement, adjusts the sugar and soymilk levels in her coffee to suit her taste, and goes. Probably back out into the daily trappings of a high-pressure business world to which Johnston can as little relate as she can to his queer sounding garage symphony. Johnston rarely leaves the garage these days, or rather, he rarely leaves the house next door to his parents’ in Waller, Texas, a dwelling recently procured for him with funds raised from the 2004 release “Discovered Covered: The Late Great Daniel Johnston.” For Johnston and his parents, some days are better than others. A lifelong battle with mental illness has made it necessary for him to spend much of his time close to home, in the comfort and care of his family, with his cigarettes and his drawings and his fame spreading across the land.

His fame is certainly spreading more rapidly these days, thanks in part to a new high-profile exhibit of Johnston artwork currently on display at the renowned Whitney Museum in Manhattan, and to “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” documentary filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig’s astonishing chronicle of its titular subject’s many triumphs and torments. The man himself remains somewhat on the periphery of the film (we almost never see him being directly interviewed), but in many ways this makes for a more compelling character study, as we are able to glimpse Johnston’s work through his eyes and ears as the narrative unfolds. He turns out to have been an active documentarian of his own early life, and the resulting trove of cassette recordings, drawings, paintings and home videos reveal a boundless creative energy. Even those long familiar with the story will discover a much fuller portrait of the artist as a young man, an older man and a man sometimes confounded by the demands of a life increasingly at the center of the attentions of the art and music world. It’s a recognition Johnston has openly sought, ever since his sudden arrival, in the mid 1980s, in burgeoning Austin, Texas—a slimmer, sunnier, less beleaguered person than the one we’ll come to know, winning over early converts to his music with disarming directness and enthusiasm.

Those who were on the scene at the time recall an exuberant, slightly odd fellow who kept popping up all over town, passing out copies of his first homemade cassette “Hi, How Are You?” to anyone who would listen. His status as a local cult figure was greatly propelled by an appearance on an early MTV broadcast from the area. Johnston worked at McDonald’s at the time, holding court with a growing number of fans and curiosity seekers. As Austin musicians started to get hip to the fact that, beneath the quavering voice and toy organ, a seriously talented artist was waiting to be recognized, stories of his erratic behavior began to emerge, behavior not at all helped by his discovery of LSD and other mood altering substances. But it soon became clear that beyond the mere eccentricities of an “artistic temperament,” there lurked a dark pathology, which would periodically rear its head throughout the course of his life.

From the start, Johnston’s behavior was a source of consternation for his fundamentalist family. Although his mother feared him to be in the grips of some unholy psychosis, growing up in Virginia, he was just a hyperactive kid, not yet fully afflicted by the problems that would later bedevil him. He would derive perverse satisfaction from the way his antics exasperated and alarmed his mother. She became the screeching scold on the canvas of his imagination, a place he populated with images of floating eyeballs, severed heads and superheroes. The covers of his records, and his now famous drawings and sketches, are filled with such images. His fascinations are the stuff of pop culture and childhood fantasy—Casper the Friendly Ghost, The Beatles, Mountain Dew, Captain America—but even from his earliest musings, the seemingly whimsical lyrics and artwork betrayed the longings of a troubled soul.

The film finds its central themes in its serious examination of Johnston’s lifelong battle with mental illness. Whatever schizophrenia and manic depression may have done to enhance his legend, they have been nothing but hell on his family and friends. There are moments almost too painful to watch, as when Bill Johnston recalls the ordeal he endured with his son on a flight back to Virginia from an Austin concert appearance. Johnston became delusional in the cockpit as his father piloted the small plane. Convinced he was Casper the Friendly Ghost and could fly, he grabbed the keys from the ignition and threw them out the window. Relying instinctively on his emergency training, Bill just barely managed to cheat death for he and his son, and crash-landed the plane into the treetops of an Arkansas forest.

Sadly, these occasional spells of dementia appear all too often in the story. From Johnston’s first visit to New York City, where a bout of paranoid panic led him to ditch his companions in Sonic Youth, roam the Bowery and eventually end up in Bellevue hospital (later that night, we are told, he opened for fIREHOSE at CBGB’s), to his attempt to exorcise imagined demons from the soul of a frightened elderly woman, who was badly injured when she leapt from her second story window in terror. The film brings home the devastating consequences that mental illness has wrought on the Johnston’s otherwise tranquil family life, and any romanticized notions about the delicate membrane that separates genius and madness are rendered moot in the shadow of this most heartbreaking reality.

Whatever critics and fans might have to say about whether or not Johnston’s work deserves a place alongside the great artists of his time, and there are certainly plenty who remain unconverted, ultimately it’s the message in the songs that matters. Few artists are able to summon up the emotional honesty to nakedly address their most deeply held hopes and fears. Like his hero John Lennon, Johnston succeeds in making the universal personal. If there is a distinctly childlike quality in the way he greets the universe, it’s a child many of us still recognize in our own fascinations and sometimes-irrational fears. Even after all he’s been through, there may be hope for Daniel Johnston yet. And for us, if we’re just willing to open ourselves up to it.

Peter Jones is a writer, web designer, and aspiring banjo enthusiast living in abject poverty in Brooklyn, NY. Send hate mail to mr.peej@gmail.com.