Nicola is the protagonist of the film, and he is also Ascanio Celestini—an actor inhabiting the character while simultaneously serving as author, narrating from offscreen and inevitably making it his own story.
Nicola was born in the sixties, long before the Basaglia law. School and family (his father is a shepherd; the metaphor is masterful), the institutions themselves—none of them know how to help him, or even listen to his distress, let alone understand it. Instead, they appear as the true destructive force of his fragile inner world, driving him—still a boy—almost naturally into a psychiatric hospital.
The hospital, the third institution, deliberately set against the other two or even superimposed on them, is the one that will know how to receive him, give him rules to follow, lines to trace. And in doing so, it will know how to turn him into a perfect "madman."
Yet the film does not show us this path of individual destruction. It is not violence, not electroshock—only evoked—that Celestini wants us to witness. What moves him as an empathetic author who enters into his characters (who are first and foremost real people with true stories of suffering, people brave enough to tell them while he listened with a striking gift for becoming "other") is to restore his character's emotional disorientation, to transform his inner world into poetry—his joy, his love, his pain. He wants us to understand that the deepest anguish lies not in the harm suffered, but in the total inability to comprehend why.
By "becoming" the black sheep, Celestini gives us his act of love for the last, the unheard, and it is impossible—given the subject matter and the emotional power he transmits—not to think of Marco Lombardo Radice, the "revolutionary" child psychiatrist who in the early eighties pioneered therapeutic approaches rooted above all in listening to children's needs and compensating for their emotional deprivation. His emblematic words return to mind, inflected autobiographically, from the central passage of Catcher in the Rye: "That's the thing that kills me about it. It really does. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."
Fabrizio Aglianò, 2011