Touched with Fire

Bipolar disorder has afflicted a number of everyday characters in film, from Mark Ruffalo’s struggling dad in Infinitely Polar Bear to the ballroom dancing Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook. But the illness seems to strike the creative class the hardest, with the highs and lows often romanticized on screen as an exchange, of sorts, for an artist’s gift. Look at the biopics available about Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Ludwig van Beethoven to watch any number of “tortured” artists at work.
Touched with Fire, writer-director-composer Paul Dalio’s feature debut (and executive produced by his NYU mentor Spike Lee), is the latest film to explore creativity and mental illness. Originally titled Mania Days, the film follows a tempestuous relationship between two bipolar poets, Carla (Katie Holmes) and Marco (Luke Kirby), whose talents are more quotidian than Keatsian.
They meet during a group therapy session at a residential mental health facility and immediately dislike each other. The two warm up once they discover common interests in art and poetry. Rather than making the romance the central story, Dalio, who has firsthand experience with bipolar disorder, keeps the focus on the characters’ journeys with the illness. Dalio also manages to keep Touched with Fire (mostly) away from the melodrama, though he seems less adept at subtext and subtlety. The multiple references to Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), a painting that depicts the view from the artist’s room in an asylum, become tiresome.
Touched with Fire is at its most successful when Dalio attempts to articulate the bipolar mind. Holmes delivers a powerfully restrained performance as a character trying to temper her manic movements and rapid-fire speech, though her countenance belies a racing psyche. Kirby’s Marco, a rhymer and street poet, is pure frenetic energy, talking nonstop about nothing and everything. It’s in these early scenes that Dalio and director of photography Kristina Nikolova use the camera to dizzying and claustrophobic effect: The unsteady and breakneck maneuvers become almost experiential for the viewer.