"Ghostlight," which focuses on a construction worker drawn into a production of "Romeo and Juliet," is a drama about traumatized people healing themselves with art. It's messy in the way that life is messy. It's one of those movies that simultaneously feels too long and not long enough. But there's a purity and earnestness to what it's doing that's increasingly unusual in American independent cinema. Co-directed by the Chicago-based filmmaking team of Kerry O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson (O'Sullivan wrote the script), the story focuses on a family played by an actual family of working actors. The father, Dan (Keith Kupferer), is a construction worker. He lives in a suburban neighborhood with his wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen), and their teenage daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer). This is a troubled family. You can see that long before the movie reveals all the pieces of their trouble and lets you examine them. Advertisement Some viewers will be irritated by one of the qualities I found most intriguing about "Ghostlight": you don't really know what this family's "deal" is, so to speak, until fairly deep in the film (I won't say what it is; suffice to say it's an unimaginable loss). For quite a long time, you can't figure out why they're all acting the way they are. Dan is sullen and a bit of a space case at work. He has a hair-trigger temper that suddenly erupts through his personal fog and causes severe problems. Daisy also has a temper and is being disciplined for an outburst at her school. She uses profanity in settings where nobody uses profanity and doesn't care that a taboo is being violated. Sharon is a dutiful, attentive wife and mom who seems to be hanging on by a thread. In due time, you get little details about what happened to them, and the more you learn, the more you start to feel the weight of it yourself.