Impossibly adorable people and impossibly perfect stoops are all a part of Adam's world.

Adam

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From the outset, Adam appears to be your typical indie romantic comedy. An impossibly adorable and childlike man named Adam (Hugh Dancy) begins to woo his impossibly adorable and childlike neighbour, Beth (Rose Byrne). After some flirting in the laundry room and on the front stoop of their perfect New York walk-up building, Beth begins to realize that Adam’s childlike qualities go beyond your typical Michael Cera-style indie hipster naïveté — he actually suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, which causes him to be socially awkward, brutally honest and emotionally insensitive. The two forge ahead and fall in love, with some sweet but funny bumps along the road.

Having no experience with Asperger’s, it’s hard to evaluate Dancy’s performance or how realistically writer-director Max Mayer has portrayed the syndrome, but this film seems to be doing more of a service than a disservice to those suffering from the affliction. Yes, Dancy’s own charm and good looks, as well as Adam’s inherent childlike character, do run the danger of over-romanticizing the syndrome, but there are enough dark moments in the script to balance that out. As Beth begins falling for Adam, she researches his condition, offering some educational benefit to the audience. That said, there are still some aspects of this film that could make one feel uneasy.

If Adam doesn’t infantilize a grown man with Asperger’s, the character of Beth does. An overly sweet kindergarten teacher with serious daddy issues (she uses Adam as a foil against her charlatan father, played by Peter Gallagher), she spends most of the film talking to her boyfriend like he’s one of her five-year-old students. While Mayer does address the disparity in the couple’s emotional needs, there’s something just plain creepy in her relationship with Adam that’s hard to get past.

Overall, Adam is a decent movie with good performances from its lead actors, but not a very powerful one. Its failings don’t stem from the subject matter — the film drags in spite of the Asperger’s angle, not because of it — and ultimately forgets to make any sort of point. Asperger’s in itself isn’t enough to carry a film and it certainly isn’t enough to give real depth to an otherwise unremarkable romantic dramedy.