Simply put, it just feels like a cheap shot when the film begins by presenting the undeniable struggles of the main character's life and has him pursue a cure for completely understandable reasons - and then effectively turns around and says "Actually, all of the problems in his life were his fault, he didn't really get better in ways which matter after that, and let us present a totally idealized version of someone with the exact same condition to prove why."
"Accept yourself for who you are and do not seek external fixes" message might come from the right place, but it is not so inspiring when his condition was effectively shown interfering with something as important as his eyesight and generally affect his quality of life even when nobody was watching.
Furthermore, this film also exhibits the same contrivance which brought down Challengers for me - the insistence that like a duckling, the lead MUST imprint onto the first remotely meaningful relationship shown in the narrative and fail to form anything offscreen even when all the conditions are there for it. It is worse here when that relationship effectively comes from a combination of pity and fetishism - as the film is at least honest enough to acknowledge.
For all of that, the first half is very strong in its depiction of the grime of main character's life, reinforced in a variety of unusual ways like the PSA he is part of. Even the second half has enough neat moments - whether in digging down to the details of stage productions or other smaller twists and turns - to avoid ever feeling like a total loss.
I suppose one reason I'm so disappointed is because this could have been a remarkable narrative of a climber who benefited from the system (in this case, the research breakthrough turning him into "A Different Man") only to pull up the ladder behind him for entirely selfish reasons. Instead, the film pretends the climb was never worth it in the first place and stalls around various meta layers instead of developing the point.
