Jessica Yu's In the Realms of the Unreal is a balanced introduction to the life and work of Henry Darger. Or at least as much as we can know of this enigmatic figure, who produced one of the best-known examples of outsider art, a spawling illustated novel running to 15,000 pages of manuscript.

Darger was a nondescript janitor living in a one-room apartment in Chicago. A runaway from a troubled past, he kept to himself, though neighbors often heard animated conversations in several voices coming from his room. The handful of acquaintances and neighbors that are still available for interview can't even agree on how Darger pronounced his last name, or what pew he sat in for mass.

When Darger died in 1973, essentially a ward of the church, his landlord Nathan Lerner discovered the huge manuscript of the novel (generally called In the Realms of the Unreal) along with an autobiography. Apparently composed over the course of more than 50 years, the books were never intended for a wider audience. Yet they are a facinating portrait of childlike glee, inventiveness, and obsession.

Filmmaker Yu brings both books to life (sometimes too literally). The novel is a rambling account of the war between the good country of Abbieannia and the evil state of Glandelinia, which is enslaving good Christian children. The forces of good are led by the Vivian Girls, seven identical siblings. As illustrated by Darger in watercolor, this is a land of fantastical protective dragons and candy-colored gardens; most of the male warriors are generals dressed in the garb of the American Civil War. It is a land of asexual innocence (perhaps: Darger seems to be badly confused about the matter) and horrible, bloody violence.

Darger struggled with his draftsmanship, and eventually discovered the expedient of photographic reproduction of images from popular culture: magazine covers, pages from coloring books, comic strips. (Hence the septuplets.) Yu traces a couple of images that Darger used repeatedly in his paintings, from source to final product.

When Yu lets the work speak for itself, the film is on solid ground: camera pans across the more whimsical or horrific paintings, or the fine narration by Larry Pine of passages from the autobiography. The other voiceover artist, however, the young Dakota Fanning, produces an effect that is cloying. And Yu missteps when she computer-animates some of the paintings with a paper-cutout effect. (Much of the animation also suffers from digital artifacts.)

Yet, just as Darger allowed real life to leak into his novel, when Yu overlays stock documentary footage of Chicago with animated child warriors and Blengiglomenean serpents, the effect works.

Most art is intended by the artist to have an effect on a public, but Darger would have none of that. Art often serves as a means of self-expression, and we feel pity for the pain that Darger must have been in, for the demons within that drove him to produce such a Brobdignagian work. Art expresses the infatuations of a culture, and when Yu's camera lingers over materials presumably salvaged from Darger's apartment—a image of Shirley Temple, a photograph of the Dionne quintuplets (North America's first children of the media feeding frenzy)—there is an insuck of breath, a recognition that if Darger was crazy, then we all are.

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The rules, the rules, and the rules, part 1.

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