Great movie except at the end.

Yes, the end was terrible.

I thought it was a sensitively done movie, but it went overboard at the end and became too clichéd.

And all the pieces matter (The Wire)

I don't know what part about the end bothered you. I was bothered that he suddenly seemed to "get over" his autism. The way he held his mother's hands and hugged her in the booth were too big of a change from his behavior in the beginning.

If they had just made his "reaching out" to her be grabbing her hand on the stick shift, that would have been in character. It would have been him finally touching his mother the way he had his father, with some "tool" as the excuse for hand holding. They had already established that he did so with the sparklers. The gear shift would have been very similar.

The whole girlfriend thing leading up to suppressed feelings over his father's death - i don't know. That felt contrived to me, but maybe that can happen with autistic kids.

It didn't almost ruin it for me, it totally ruined it. Up until the last 15 minutes or so I felt this was a credible picture of a young man on the spectrum. Too many emotional breakthroughs at the end did not feel credible at all and lost all the goodwill they had built up for most of the movies.

I swear screenwriters have no idea of how a rational mind works and for them "love conquers all" is always the winning formula. Blech.