The true story behind All the Bright Places, now streaming on Netflix

Based on the young adult novel by Jennifer Niven of the same name, Brett Haley’s All the Bright Places is now streaming on Netflix and has a true story to share about mental illness.

In 2015, Indiana-born fiction author Jennifer Niven wrote a love story about two Indiana teenagers, both struggling to find brightness in life’s darker times. Brett Haley, the director of the 2018 dramedy, Hearts Beat Loud, has adapted Niven’s award-winning novel, All the Bright Places, into a 2020 film adaptation which is now streaming on Netflix. But while the story may be fiction, there is a very real love story behind its inspiration.

Starring Maleficent‘s Elle Fanning and Every Day‘s Justice Smith, All the Bright Places centers around the story of two high schoolers–Violent (Fanning) and Theodore (Smith)–who both harbor a desperate desire to break free of their small, Indiana town. While Violet is popular among the student body, she is also mourning the loss of her sister and secretly struggling with survivor’s remorse.

Theodore, while seemingly calm and care-free on the outside, deals with bouts of severe suicidal thoughts and is regarded as “the school freak.” The two students pair up for an assignment–via Theodore’s request–where they must report on two (or more) “wonders” of Indiana.

As Theodore, known as “Finch” and Violet–who Theodore affectionately refers to as Ultraviolet–explore Indiana and dig deep into each other’s thoughts and emotions, the two fall in love and learn how to accept both someone else’s scars as well as their own.

All the Bright Places carries a lot of the same themes seen in The Fault in Our Stars, Five Feet Apart, and other teen romance films centering around two people finding ways to heal each other’s brokenness. A notable difference in All the Bright Places, that sets it apart from other romance stories that have come before it, is that it doesn’t have a terminally ill backbone.

Neither character is dying in this film. All the Bright Places doesn’t focus on depression or sadness stemming from one or both of the main characters’ lives being cut short. Violet and Theodore’s brokenness comes from a place deep inside that’s suffocated their emotions and has caused them to retreat from the rest of the world. That is–until they meet each other.

While Niven has written eight books previously, All the Bright Places was her first young adult fiction novel. The story comes from “a very personal place,” as Niven put it in an interview with ABS-CBN News in 2016, even more so than the setting for Violet and Theodore’s journey being in Niven’s own home town.

“It’s a story I didn’t know I could write because it was so personal,” said Niven. “So I took a long time to get to it. And I’m so glad that I finally did.”

After her literary agent of 15 years passed away unexpectedly in 2013, Niven began reassessing what her new project would be as she began to steer away from non-fiction. She recalled the last conversation she had with her agent, who told her that, whatever she wrote, she should write it with her “whole heart.” Niven became inspired to write All the Bright Places, based on a boy she had been in love with many years before who lived with bipolar dissorder.

“Having that time with him and seeing first-hand his struggles with [being] bipolar, and just his struggles on a daily basis to be in the world, I that, more than anything, informed Finch,” said Niven in an interview with Confessions of an Opinionated Book Geek. “I saw it and I lived it with him.”

The story’s deeply personal feel comes through in Haley’s film as well, taking on more of a Bridge to Terabithia vibe than that of The Fault in Our Stars. As Theodore and Violet aim to find their “wonders” of Indiana, they seem to create their own world of safe space with each other. Because of this, All the Bright Places has as much of a child-like spirit to it as it does a deeply, and painfully, mature angle.

“Being in a high school environment, where you’re so concerned with what people think of you, is hard regardless of what you’re going through and to add on those tragedies, that’s difficult,” said Smith in an interview with DCFilmGirl about the film. “But space and time heal all wounds and the more you persist, the better it gets, the stronger you become.”

Will you be streaming All the Bright Places this weekend? What other Netflix films are you looking forward to? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!