The complicity of an audience is so integral to our perception of art that it is actually quite difficult to consider an artist creating a work intended for no one; for no reason but to exercise (or exorcise) his own creative will and wiles. By leaving us out of the equation, it almost seems like the artist is pointlessly wiling away his talents. It isn't pointless, of course, but such acts of creation do require a mindset far more set apart from the rest of the world than many artists can muster.

This may have been the mindset of Henry Darger, the subject of this new documentary, who spent his entire life working by day as a janitor in Chicago and by night toiling away at a body of work of jaw-dropping immensity. He wrote a novel, entitled In The Realms Of The Unreal, that was over 15,000 pages long; he illustrated his book with massive, minutely detailed watercolors, murals which he kept rolled up like ancient scrolls. In addition, he left behind thousands of pages of biographical notes which shed some light on his personal history. There wasn't a soul who was aware of this world he was creating in his tiny apartment; indeed, there weren't many souls who aware of Darger's existence at all.

Those few who did know him provide the film's sole talking-head factor. These include his landlady, who went into his room for the first time after his death in 1973 and later had it preserved as a sort of museum (which was dismantled in 2000); and a former alterboy who recalls how, throughout his entire tenure at a Chicago church, Darger sat through three celebrations of the Catholic Mass every day. Although none of the interviewees can remember how Darger's last name was pronounced, their collective remembrances paint a picture of a man who no one really knew. Everyone liked him, in the way that you might like someone you're only casually aquainted with; were it not for his work, the vague memories presented here here would undoubtedly have faded long ago.

Director Jessica Yu does not try to provide a solution to the mystery that Darger poses; rather, she simply states what facts are known and then explores the questions they raise, which are deep and rich enough to negate the necessity for much psychological insight and any sense of definite solution. Darger's work itself is too dense to generalize in any sort of soundbites. Obviously aware of this, Yu dedicates most of the film to representing the novel, via voice-over (much of it read by the eerily wise Dakota Fanning, who also narrates the rest of the film), and its accompanying artwork, which, in a surrealist masterstroke, Yu chose to have animated.

The novel itself tells the tale of the Vivian Girls - seven prepubescent sisters - and their thrilling adventures during the war against the masculine-centric Glandelinian Empire, which had enslaved all of its children until their valiant uprising. Assisting in the battles are a series of foreign armies (including, notably one led by a General Darger) but by and large the frays were bloody affrontals of children - mostly girls - against adults. Adding to the troubling nature of the material is the fact that Darger's illustrations frequently depicted the children in the nude, and all with male genitalia.

Align this bizarre detail, and all of the other bizarre details in the work, with knowledge that Darger tried multiple times to adopt children; that he was raised in oprhanages after his mother and sister died; that he may have been sexually retarded (its posited that he quite likely did not understand the physical differences between boys and girls); and that he was an overtly pious Catholic. A fuller portrait of the man begins to emerge amidst the contradictions, and it becomes clear that 'man,' in the general sense of the word, may not be the right term for Darger, who seemed to be trying to vicariously live in his own version of Peter Pan's Neverland.

That vicariousness may be one of the reason why Darger never showed his work to anyone. Had he done so, it may very well have been siezed upon just as it was after his death, for there's no denying its brilliance. The novel itself is rather naive, but his paintings are masterpieces, collages of brilliant color and texture. Darger was self taught and culled his talent from a variety of sources, but his work is instantly recognizable and original, clear and vibrant and explicitly narrative in its form. And it takes to animation splendidly in sequences that are wondrous, frightening, sad - and never separable from the context of their progenitor.

After his death and the great discovery that followed it, Darger's work became well known in art circles, and today he is regarded as one of the great Outsider Artists. His paintings and literature has been dissected and examined with far more depth (although probably with no more conclusiveness) than Yu's delicate treatment of him here. It seems clear from the portrait Yu extricates, though, that Darger would be saddened by this form of attention; in some corner of his mind, had a notion that he was simply telling stories that would be beloved by children around the world. But that was only a notion, never fulfilled, and whatever his intentions may have been, he has ultimately fulfilled the general concept of the artist, and found his audience.