Within the first 10 minutes of this film, Paul Dalio—who wrote, directed, edited, and scored this debut rom-dram about two poets with bipolar disorder—employs all known clichés used in movies about writers and movies about people with bipolar disorder. He does that work over the course of two parallel sequences.

Sequence one:

Carla (Katie Holmes) wakes up in the middle of the night burning with poetic inspiration. There's a metaphorical Holy Ghost devil flaming through her mind, and she's the vessel through which it speaks. The only way to exercise that lyric demon-god is to use her trusty quill tip pen (no less!) to furiously scribble down its words onto a yellow legal pad (no less!). Does she like what she wrote down? NO SHE DOESN'T. What can she do? TEAR OUT THE PAGE AND CRUMPLE IT UP. Rinse. Repeat.

Sequence two:

Marco (aka Luna—no less!—played by Luke Kirby), also a poet, lives in a crappy apartment with rats. He's surrounded by knee-high stacks of suspiciously pristine books. He spends his evenings drawing apocalyptic symbols all over issues of the Village Voice, and he spends his late nights stapling those issues to walls and switching them out of newspaper racks all over town before slipping into an underground club to participate in freestyle rap battles.

I hereby call a moratorium on all imagery used in the previous two paragraphs. People who use this imagery perpetuate the idea that poets are brooding figures who want to live in rat-infested apartments in order to feel Inspired and to feel connected to “real life.” I'm not saying that I haven't met people like that. I have. Those people tend to be bad poets. They're obsessed with the idea of being a Poet and not with poetry, which seems to be the case with Dalio as well.

Dalio also uses a lot of familiar imagery in his portrayal of mania and depression. Marco and Carla end up meeting in a mental hospital and falling in love, where they spend an entire montage feeding each other's mania (which, in this film, always equals art production) by talking about pyramids. There's plenty of illuminati-esque talk and plenty of shots of meds swirling down drains. Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night makes several appearances. During the course of their romance, the two lay out a bunch of spoken subtext suggesting that their bipolar disorder is the result of his unresolved mommy issues and her unresolved daddy issues. I'll stop there.

Dalio does attempt to complicate the story by showing the damaging effects of mania, but his romanticization of the Maniac-Poet shines through those moments with such a fiery starlit-burning-sun-passion-moon that it's impossible to take those gestures seriously. Holmes's and Kirby's performances don't help much in that effort, either. Their characters write faux high-lyric poetry structured by overdetermined sun/moon metaphors, and they offer up the acting equivalent of that kind of poetry.

At the end of the movie, a list of maybe 20 legendary writers and visual artists who may have been bipolar rolls down the screen like credits. The list includes people such as Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Vincent Van Gogh, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Did their alleged bipolar disorder give them special powers and greatly contribute to their art? Who knows. Even if it did, reducing their artistic achievements to byproducts of their mental illness ignores every other aspect of their lives that enhanced their craft, including strong communities, thousands of hours of practice, and the million lessons learned from failure.