Is there a middle ground, I wonder, simultaneously catering to the folks who know nothing of your subject as well as those who know it like the back of their hand? Sometimes it happens, and In the Realms of the Unreal hits the mark perfectly. There's no danger of conflating your passion for the subject with the quality of its representation, 'cause in this case both are incredibly cool. The film concerns itself with the life and art of Henry Darger, a forgettable man who worked as a janitor and talked to himself, and whom everyone assumed was nothing special until his landlords discovered thousands of pages of writing and hundreds of huge pieces of homemade art in his room. He had spent his entire life in his rich interior world, crafting fantastical stories informed by his own life (in ways that he probably was not aware of), and creating beautiful illustrations to accompany them. The stories came to comprise a 15,000-page novel not too dissimilar to the works of Mervyn Peake or JRR Tolkien, except that those fellows, even with their exhaustive approach to detail, could never have had the patience to flesh out their epics with reams of pages accounting for the costs of each battle, or page after page specifically listing each individual soldier killed. Darger's opus was almost equal part s autobiography, plagiarism, genius, and insanity—as is this wonderful movie. ITROTU takes the interesting approach of narrating Darger's life through his own words and images, keenly selected from the enormous body of work he left behind, interpreting Darger's motivations, personal pain, and ultimate truths through revelations he himself most likely didn't know he was making. Jessica Yu's crafty and beguiling swirl of animation, pure screenplay, photography, interviews, and narration (by Dakota Fanning!) results in something like Ken Burns on obscure and dementedly powerful psychotropics. The logic is at once perfectly sound, deeply insightful, and continually elusive. Its approach could not be better suited to the amorphous mystery that was Darger's struggle with life. The film wisely chooses to dispense with any discussion of "art" or, worse, "outsider art," instead simply laying out the facts and taking the viewer on a journey through Darger's inner realms. It's one of the most beautiful, personal, and profound journeys I've taken in a long time.
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