Could have been a great or at least skillfully directed "okay" 90s film, but suffers from uneven writing and scene execution typical of films today. It's not terrible, and I even enjoyed it and mildly rooted for the protagonist, but it just doesn't _quite_ work.

Helen Hunt is fine. John Leguizamo is fine, and Sheridan is fine... their characters just aren't that compelling. Call me biased, but I felt the most for Ana de Armas' character. The woman is just sparkling whenever she's onscreen... yet even her character feels like a disappointment in the final scenes, as the story feels like it just doesn't have the stamina to bother being dramatic fiction anymore, [spoiler] and settles for a quick, boringly realistic wrap-up so Bart can get his "Autist shut-in goes to the mall" scene like he didn't just go through 90 minutes of harrowing, first love, sex-lies-and-video screenplay drama. [/spoiler]

As an aside, I also have to wonder about the depiction of Bart as "Autistic". I'm on the spectrum myself and did find a number of things that, while generally more extreme than myself, definitely remind me of episodes of social confusion and awkwardness in my life, but Bart's portrayal from scene to scene seems inconsistent if not outright unrealistic. Yes, we can be capable of being more natural, and closer to normal degrees of suaveness like he was when playing back his first meeting with Andrea, but the degree of his clueless, awkward robiticness seems not to match his later degree of very natural social responses when he's only responding to her playback. And then, for the rest of the film, he goes back to the seemingly nearly completely emotionally blind and dumb demi-Rain Man.

It's important to represent the spectrum of atypical mentalities, and I have no problem with showing Bart or _Rain Man's_ Ray, or John Nash's, again, idiot savant, but it would be nice if films would also show autistic, ADHD, OCD, etc. characters that have more subtle and sometimes entirely overlooked cases instead of making all examples those of the " special boy", or "weird but magically gifted novel protagonist".
I don't pretend to understand the struggles of others, but it's a unique struggle of its own to have gone through an especially confusing childhood and teenage life, learning the hard way how people work, but not being quite different enough for anyone competent to ever recognize your actual strengths and deficits.

I want to see those stories if even just as subtly acknowledged character framing.