The movie was awarded this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the Sundance festival, for outstanding feature film focusing on science and technology. It is being distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, whose recent credits include “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Juno” and last year’s Oscar winner for best picture, “Slumdog Millionaire.”

Image A STARRING ROLE Hugh Dancy of Adam during filming in New York. His character has an obsessive interest in astronomy. Credit... Julia Griner/Serenade Films/Fox Searchlight

Mr. Dancy plays a young man with Asperger’s who is left to fend for himself after his father dies. One day a woman played by Rose Byrne  a “neurotypical,” as people with Asperger’s call almost everyone else  moves into the apartment upstairs. Romance ensues, along with misunderstanding and confusion.

“Adam is about life, not his disability,” said Jonathan Kaufman, the founder of the Manhattan-based consulting agency DisabilityWorks Inc., who worked as a technical adviser on the film. “It uses his Asperger’s as the lens that colors his life, not the central focal point. It’s about relationships, love, family. The illness is not separate from the person.”

Mr. Kaufman, who was born with cerebral palsy, founded DisabilityWorks nine years ago to help corporations and agencies develop ways to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities. He also served as an adviser on an HBO film about Temple Grandin, a woman with high-functioning autism who became a professor at Colorado State University and a pioneering designer of humane livestock facilities. That film, starring Claire Danes, is to make its debut in 2010.

Members of the Sloan Prize jury praised “Adam” as lifelike and believable. “The portrayal of someone who is enthusiastic about science rather than dismissed as geeky was very genuine,” said Fran Bagenal, a professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado.

And Raymond F. Gesteland, a professor of human genetics at the University of Utah, said “ ‘Adam’ will help the rest of the world look at Asperger’s with a new realistic light.”

Dr. Gesteland also screened the animated feature, “Mary and Max,” which opened the Sundance festival. It deals with the pen-pal relationship of a 44-year-old New Yorker, who has Asperger’s and lives on chocolate hot dogs, and a lonely 8-year-old Australian girl. The motivation for the film came from hundreds of letters, spanning 20 years, between Adam Elliot, a young Australian, and a middle-age pen pal in Staten Island who he later learned had Asperger’s.