I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but I do want to point out that they didn't make a movie about John Nash because he was a great mathematician, they made a movie because he was a great mathematician who had schizophrenia. It's not obvious to me that this image of mathematicians in popular culture is better than no image at all.
Yeah, for some reason people love this idea of a tortured "genius". I think that it makes the audience feel better. The idea that people can be smart and also relatively ok would make people jealous.
