I first heard of Adam, where else?  On Fresh Air of course.  Adam is the story of a young man living in the city whose life is changed when a pretty young woman named Beth moves into his apartment.  Beth is really intrigued by Adam from the beginning and a friendship is born that quickly becomes something more.  There’s something different about Adam that Beth can’t figure out and that turns out to be part of Adam’s charm.  Their relationship starts out on a rocky path because there are some serious miscommunication problems.  When things seem like they’re just getting to tough to deal with for Beth, Adam reveals to her that he has Asperger’s syndrome.  Asperger’s makes it hard for Adam to pick up on the emotional cues people give off in conversation.  Adam’s mind helps him to interpret the world in a very straightforward, and literal way.  The trouble is that the rest of us who are Neurotypicals (NTs) are much less straight forward and actually pepper our communication with all kinds of things we don’t actually mean.  An example from the film:

Adam is at a party with many of Beth’s friends.  One of her friends asks Adam a question about telescopes, and this being Adam’s hobby, he dives into the conversation.  The next thing you know Adam is drowning this woman in techno-jargon about telescopes and lenses that is all going WAY over her head.  But Adam isn’t picking up on her facial expressions of confusion, so he just keeps going.  Beth comes over and interrupts Adam at which point he realizes that he’s been talking too much and apologizes to the woman.  When he apologizes the woman responds with “Oh, no, not at all, I just think that some of what you were saying went a bit over my head.”  Now NTs would pick up that what this woman really meant was, “You’re talking my ear off about techno-stuff that I have no idea about and I’d like to stop talking about this… but I don’t want to offend you.”  Instead, Adam interprets this literally and starts the conversation again from the beginning but with the attempt at explaining more precisely what he was saying.  Again, Beth rescues him.

The film deals with miscommunication in relationships in a funny and at times very moving ways.  While Adam isn’t an “advocacy” film per se, it goes a long way to reveal the challenges of living with Asperger’s in an NT world and the amount of discrimination and lack of understanding that people with Asperger’s deal with.  Adam is really a story about relationships and miscommunication and that’s something that we can all relate to.