The movie shows how Grandin found comfort in animals at and early age. She has written at length that she could quite easily intuit what made animals afraid, even as she struggled to understand the nonverbal communication between people. (At one point in the movie, her mother tries to explain how people talk to each other with their eyes. "I'll never be able to do that," she says.)

Any bio-pic is challenged to cover a lifetime in a couple of hours. But this one made good use of Grandin's memoirs - Emergence: Labeled Autistic and Thinking in Pictures - radio interviews and past profiles of her, all of which gave it real substance.

What I enjoyed most is that this movie is about Temple Grandin, not autism. In addition, the movie escapes the kind of cloying emotional resolution that you often see in a film about development disability, the kind of film that makes family members like me groan and roll our eyes. Acknowledging that she could never return the love of the people who labored to help her quite the same way, the film doesn't condemn the difference or try to explain it. It just lets it be what it is — different, not less, as Ormond's character says.

Over the years, Grandin's books and interviews have helped me better understand my sister, and, or so I hope, help me let her be who she is by being aware of what she needs. This movie will help people on the "outside" understand autism like those of us on the inside see it -as just one part of a person.