James Earl Jones, Lindsay Wagner, and Danny Glover are among the stars who appear in the nonfiction "Ennis' Gift," screening tonight at the Museum of Fine Arts. Their appearances, like those of the rest of a cast that includes middle school students and adults in the business world, are heartfelt and often moving. What ties them together is the pain and shame associated with their lifelong learning disabilities, or differences, as they are called here, and their journeys toward remarkable and often highly creative successes.

The Ennis of the title is the late Ennis Cosby, actor-comedian Bill Cosby's son, who was the victim of a roadside shooting in 1997. Ennis was 27, a serious educator and a dyslexic dedicated to alternative forms of teaching. His parents established a foundation to sustain his work, and this film by the gifted Arlington filmmaker Joshua Seftel, is part of that mission.

The eloquent and stentorian Jones was a stutterer. Actor Henry Winkler pretended to read but couldn't, even in high school. Ann Bancroft, a courageous polar explorer, was terrified in classrooms. With the varying supports they had, each found a way out of the self- loathing that learning differences almost invariably impose on the young people who have them. Bancroft's is an especially powerful story, although Seftel's skillful interviewing and subtle use of original music by Roger Miller infuses most of these personal stories with considerable drama.

The aims of the film are to inform a broad audience about the often hidden agonies people with learning differences suffer, and to pass the word that there is a gamut of ways to liberate the creative gifts these people tend to have in abundance.

Seftel achieves these goals with grace and spirited empathy in part, perhaps, because he has a serious reading disability, something the Cosbys didn't know when they chose him to make the film.

Seftel's past films include the savvy "Taking on the Kennedys," broadcast on PBS, and "Lost and Found," which received an Emmy nomination. A premium cable channel will air the new documentary next fall.

John Koch, Globe Staff