The accidental artwork and 15,000 page epic novel of the late Henry Darger is the fascinating centerpiece of this new documentary from Jessica Yu. When the reclusive and destitute Darger died in 1973, the landlady of the Chicago apartment building where Henry had lived for 40 years found an astonishing collection of albums containing the staggering assemblage of images and text. The confines of his Lincoln Park neighborhood were a universe away from the vast kingdom laid out on cheap butcher paper. Like Henry himself, the tattered binders held the massive but organized documentation of an alternate reality in a work created only for its author.

Employing the ultimate coping mechanism, the self-taught artist began by copying and tracing pictures from his sole childhood comfort: the children’s books he treasured and which became a means to endure his painful life. Spending an entire life literally alone in the world, landlady Kiyoko Lerner and a handful of neighbors were a distant approximation of those who might be called friends. Lerner recognized immediately that what Henry left behind was a major find.

In the years since his death, his work has had comprehensive exhibitions and he is firmly ensconced as one of those tormented creative souls known as Outsider Artists. Contrasting with his shabby existence and extremely limited connection to the real world, his time was spent writing and illustrating his whimsical and tragic tome about a family of sisters, and their battles against those who would cruelly use and abuse children. In its 82 minutes Yu squanders not an instant and beautifully accomplishes a two-fold task. First, a man invisible for all of his life is revealed in his glorious capacity to cope with the harshest of realities. Second, the illustrated work is brought to effervescent life by painstakingly adding movement to animate Henry’s drawings, without adding new elements to the originals. The voice-over narration and readings of portions of the text allows the viewer a rarefied glimpse into the soul of this one-man fellowship. In many ways, he stayed a child for all of his 81 years. Although one can’t ignore the gender confusion (Henry drew a penis on the little girls), or the ambiguity toward the authority figures of his Catholic faith, these are far from the whole story.

Henry called his work In the Realms of the Unreal. Its’ heroines are seven young girls he called Violet and her Sisters, or The Vivians. They fight bravely for innocent children against their adult enemies. Yu begins by describing Henry’s life from early childhood as an impoverished one. After his mother died, he lost his sister to adoption. He was sent to a school for mental incompetents, then lost his father to a poor house death. He spent his youth in a succession of various situations for penniless children and was essentially used as child slave labor.

Yu leaves it to the viewer to ponder whether a life lived in the imagination can replace one with human connection. His meager income from menial jobs left Henry without the financial means to even have a dog, yet the film reveals Darger as a living example of the ability of a person to indeed be an island and survive.