Manic Depression! Plane crashes! Assault! It's the kind of drama one normally associates with hedonistic rock stars like Mötley Crüe or Oasis, not underground folk singers. But Jeff Feuerzeig's The Devil and Daniel Johnston reveals the life of this eponymous star to have been as harrowing and turbulent as any.

A troubled but gifted teen from West Virginia, Johnston ran away from home to join a traveling carnival and wound up, miraculously, becoming the darling of the Austin folk scene. Appearances on MTV seemed to confirm Johnston's arrival, but on the cusp of wider success, he was overwhelmed by mental problems, and began a series of downward spirals that often saw him hospitalized. In one instance, he even threw the ignition key out the window of an airborne plane.

Yet somehow, Johnston survived it all to witness a late career renaissance. Feuerzeig charts the singer's wildly shifting fortunes with the adulation of a fan. Thanks to Johnston's compulsive self-documentation— through drawings, audio cassettes, and home movies—the film includes an unusually detailed, chronological portrait of an artist both developing and unraveling. It is at times terrifying, at others exhilarating, and always straddling the fine line between genius and madness.