After eight years of living at Jesus People USA, I struggle to maintain a hopeful heart for many of my hardcore homeless neighbors here in Uptown Chicago. Heck. Why not tell the truth? I fight an active dislike for them. I often go out of my way to avoid them the same way that many of you readers tacitly avoid eye contact with the people that beg for change in your own neighborhoods. It isn’t their dirtiness or odd dress or the fact that many of them are mentally ill, alcoholic, or drug addicted. The thing that drives me crazy is the picture of them I have allowed to form in my head. My paranoia can border on the suburban. It’s all too easy to see every street person around me as terminally on the make, even subhuman. Sorry if my honesty bothers anybody.

In its sparse seventy-eight minutes, Jupiter’s Wife has given me a much needed tool to combat the John Bircher within. Michel Negroponte’s documentary follows the story of Maggie, a fortyish and presumably mentally ill homeless woman living in New York’s Central Park. Could the bevy of dogs she refers to as her children correspond to an actual long-lost family? What about her assertion that she is the wife of the Roman God Jupiter and the daughter of actor Robert Ryan? Is her homelessness meaningfully chosen or merely the by-product of mental illness?

The answers to these questions will require more thought than provided by simply viewing the film. But the facts of Maggie’s life and past as they are revealed serve not only to humanize and demystify her but to remind us that all homeless people once had homes and that often many even had marriages, children, careers, and seemingly bright futures. Many things can lead to homelessness. Without revealing too much, one of the saddest moments of revelation in Jupiter’s Wife is that while many people choose homelessness, they often put up with it because it’s easier than facing the issues they would have to fight through to avoid it.

The overall effect of this excellent film is the stripping away of the simplistic cliches that constitute the mental picture many have of homelessness. The more we learn about Maggie and her use of language the more we understand the complexity of her plight and ours. Human brokenness is a simple fact—whether you live in the suburbs or on the street. Who’s to say that one lives more honestly than another? Easy moralizing aside, this winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival is guaranteed food for thought. But be careful: the next thing you know you might actually start seeing those kind of people as just people.

People with special problems, perhaps, and a more pronounced degree of visible brokenness, but also mirror images of who we all are inside.