But in adulthood his mental health began crumbling, and his actions brought Sandra and her family not only emotional trauma but financial ruin. Patiently, using interviews and footage shot by Duanne himself at various levels of incapacity and paranoia, this film lays bare how the American health care system seems designed, at every level, to fail the mentally ill and those who try to be of genuine service to them.

It does so with such credibility and coherence that the movie’s very plain style and Sandra Luckow’s occasional Candide-like displays of naïveté as a player in this story — “Duanne had stopped cc-ing me on his emails, and he was absent from social media,” she narrates late in the movie, “so I suspected there may be something wrong” — don’t matter at all. If this is a subject matter that has touched your life even minimally, you ought to see this movie.