It often seems to me that when it comes to “on the spectrum” characters, the movies have never managed to progress beyond the Hugh Dancy/Rose Byrne Asperger’s romance “Adam,” which came out some 15 years ago. Screenwriters take liberties, making symptoms/behavioral quirks fit the contrivances of the plot, almost always showing themselves at the most convenient moment, shoved into the background much of the rest of the time.

But there’s a line in the new Argentine romance “Goyo” that echoes one I heard and reported from an “Asperger’s Wife” (support group member) I interviewed for a story about how “accurate” “Adam” was back in 2009.

“Have you never dated a man who never seems to lie?”

That doesn’t make this tone-shifting melodrama come off. But it does go a ways in explaining “how” people fall for someone who, for instance, counts the steps of every staircase he encounters, freezes-up or over-reacts to any change in routine, who’s afraid of the subway, leery of being touched and alarmed at the loud noises of any crowd, especially soccer games.

Argentine Nicolás Furtado of “The Big Love Picture” has the title role, a facts-filled/college-educated thirtysomething tour guide at Argentina’s National Museum of Art. If you need someone to deconstruct the South American masterpiece “The Return of Malón,” he’s your guy.

He lives in luxury with his concert pianist sister, Saula (Soledad Villamil) and occasionally hangs with his older brother Matute (Pablo Rago), and his routine includes daily swimming therapy with a “special needs” group that he avoids by holding his breath on the bottom of the pool.

But from the moment he spies “her,” cursing an unwieldy umbrella, her face bathed in the rain, Goyo has a new infatuation. It turns out Eva Montero (Nancy Dupláa) is new security guard at the museum. Goyo can’t stop staring at her.

He stalks her onto the subway, where he freaks out (he never rides the subway) and she freaks out over his creepy stare. But taking romantic advice from the crude, locker-room-talking Matute, he manages an apology and gets his shot at “getting to know” her. And hopefully, as he and Matute crudely and comically make clear, that’ll lead to something else new for Goyo — sex.

Veteran writer-director Marcos Carnevale has worked a LOT in South American TV, and that informs and hobbles his script, which veers from cloying and coarse to sensitive and brittle. Like a lot of TV folks making feature films, he’s overstuffed and cluttered his melodrama, tossing in spousal abuse, mommy issues, alcoholism and the blunt fact that the college-educated docent and the “much older”(not really) middle school drop-out guard have “nothing in common.”

But when Goyo — short for Gregorio Villaneuve — tells Eva Montero of what drew him to her, the way the “light” becomes “chrome yellow…like in Vincent’s paintings” when it hits her cheeks, we’re allowed to swoon, if only for a moment.

Matute’s “MILF” cracks and Saula’s constant boozy rehearsing and Goyo’s noting that the woman he always calls by her first and last name — “Eva Montero” — “Rain Man” style, “smiled 17 times and laughed eight times” on their first date provokes more than a little teeth-grinding.

But Dupláa (“The Retirement,” “10 Palomas”) is almost able to make us buy into this “connection,” showing us common sense reluctance in a mid-divorce mother of two flattered by the attentions of a young, handsome man, “weird” or not.

And when she sees the painting of her she’s started, well, who could resist?

The roiling emotions of love or at least infatuation are heavy-handedly “captured” for Goyo’s hallucinatory reaction to possible rejection. And Furtado and his English language counterpart (you can listen to this in Spanish, or dubbed into English) play Goyo in that standard “on the spectrum” monotone of film characterizations.

So anyone expecting this depiction of Asperger’s/”on the spectrum” autism to advance the medium will be sorely disappointed. The artistic milieu and tentative attempts at making a connection shine, but too much of what’s here is just genre cliches.

Rating: TV-MA, sex talk, profanity, alcoholism

Cast: Nicolás Furtado, Nancy Dupláa, Soledad Villamil and Pablo Rago.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marcos Carvenale. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50