I’m glad Katie Holmes’ long Scientology nightmare is over, and that she’s popping up in arty indies again. One can only imagine how sternly the therapy-disdaining church would have forbidden her from appearing in “Touched With Fire,” about bipolar disorder and its treatment.
Carla (Holmes) is a published poet in a bout of mania that lands her in the hospital; there, she meets Marco (Luke Kirby), a fellow bipolar sufferer, who views the condition as a means to artistic enlightenment. They feed off each other’s insomniac creative energy until they’re separated by nervous staff, and both spiral into depression. They reunite, and the cycle begins again.
This well-intentioned drama — writer/director Paul Dalio has spoken publicly about his own struggles — veers into a common pitfall of films that portray mental illness: Romanticizing it. Here, being manic comes off an awful lot like being on ecstasy. Still, Dalio’s characters — and Holmes and Kirby’s all-in performances — give life to the oft-cited claims by bipolar sufferers that going on medication dulls the senses to an alarming extent.
It’s the surrounding framework that doesn’t work as well. Concerned parents (Christine Lahti, Griffin Dunne and Bruce Altman) keep showing up as a sort of odd Greek chorus for scenes of intimate discussion between the couple, and the push-and-pull of Marco and Carla’s relationship with medication grows repetitive. As, indeed, it may in real-life situations, but nobody’s asking you to buy a ticket for those.