Five minutes into "Canvas," 10-year-old Chris Marino (Devon Gearhart) asks his mother "Are you okay?" She answers briskly, "I’m okay." But she says it in a manner that is so definite you know they’re in for a bumpy ride.


"Canvas" is a powerful and emotionally honest feature film about a family coping with schizophrenia. There is Mary (Marcia Gay Harden), a vulnerable, loving mother, prone to delusions and paranoia, who controls the voices she hears when she paints; John (Joe Pantolino) her tender, carpenter husband, is as deeply in love with her as he is confused by the illness doctors can't seem to get under control; and Chris, their 10-year-old son with no guideposts to help manage the chaos of his life. He skips school, goes fishing, and lashes out at a bully who asks him if his mother sleeps in a straight jacket. And he is thrilled when a girl tells him she thinks his mother is "nice." Hers is the weird one, she says, and just knowing how their respective mothers embarrass them is reassuring.


Joseph Greco, a gifted writer and director who grew up with a mentally ill mother, was urged to write what he knew about. But this film is not just about a mother's mental illness. It is about relationships, struggles and hopes and what takes place while Mary is in and out of hospitals. It is about John and Chris who work hard to maintain the rhythm of their ordinary lives in Hollywood, Florida, despite the extraordinary circumstances in which they find themselves.


Academy Award winner Marcia Gay Harden (Pollock, 2000) plays Mary with agility and nuanced gestures. She evokes a sense of helplessness while, in the middle of a pouring rain, she thrashes about and runs wild, screaming at John that she wants to go to the "real" Florida. In response to a neighbor's call, the police come, handcuff her despite John's protests, then move her stiff, frightened body into a police car. Her glazed eyes linger. And John is immobilized, not knowing who needs to be protected more, his terrorized, shackled wife or his terrified son.


The story alternates between melt-downs and pursuits while they live on the margins of Mary's illness. When John turns the pages of a picture album, and momentarily reconnects with his love's joy, a quivering chin holds the anguish of his shattered dreams. But there is no false sentimentality. In a confrontation with Chris who accuses him of caring more for the boat he's building than for him, John screams "You want your Mommy back and I want her whole, the woman I fell in love with." Everybody wants something they can’t have. "Maybe she’ll get better," John concedes, sounding more desperate than convinced.


Pantolino's moving performance has already received the Best Dramatic Performance Award from the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival (2006) and viewers will probably recognize him for his Emmy-winning role as Ralph Cifaretto from "The Sopranos."


Timing for the release of Canvas is perfect. Like many actual Americans, John is deep in debt after paying doctors bills and hospitals for 18 months. Talking to -- actually pleading with -- an anonymous bureaucrat, he screams into the phone, "If she had cancer. . .physical, mental what’s the difference? Why isn’t it covered by my HMO?" That's the same question Congress has been asking. Just this week the "Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act," an insurance parity bill with the potential to end insurance bias against treating mental illnesses, came one step closer to a vote in the full House.


In the end, you know the tables have turned when Chris parents his out-of-work father. Mary becomes less resistant to taking her medicine. And you suspect they will all get through this, not because she is cured but because, in the words of Elyn Saks, they are "learning her illness."


Canvas opens today in New York, Boston, Fort Lauderdale, and Phoenix.