Being Heumann Review: Disability Rights Without Much Nuance

By Marcus Bennett

In 1977, Judy Heumann and more than 100 activists occupied the San Francisco Federal Building for almost a month. Sian Heder’s Being Heumann turns that action into a diligent, brisk docudrama about disability rights, activism and federal obstruction.

The film opens with kinetic control. Ruth Madeley plays Judy Heumann, the “mother of the disability rights movement,” threading her wheelchair through dense traffic and flipping off impatient motorists. Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” supplies the soundtrack. No one mistakes Heumann for a passenger.

That confidence does not always serve the film. The screenplay gives the activists uncomplicated virtue and the officials uncomplicated villainy. Its result is clear moral lines rather than sustained nuance.

Written by Heder and Rebekah Taussig from Heumann’s 2020 memoir, the screenplay tests whether political commitment can survive care, hunger, disagreement and almost a month without a detailed plan.

The occupation has a precise political target. The protesters seek to force the Carter administration to implement the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, a precursor to the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act. The law would end discrimination against disabled people at institutions receiving federal money. The cause gives the ensemble its direction.

Madeley leads a scrappy group of disabled actors who quickly become a rambunctious, resourceful team. Many protesters require attendants and medication, yet their resolve remains astonishing.

Heder finds comedy in practical friction. Frustrated police cannot arrest the demonstrators because jails have no wheelchair access. The sit-in itself was unplanned. Members of the Black Panther Party deliver food and weed. A hastily erected “sex tent” fills the gaps between strategy discussions and internal squabbles. The details make the occupation feel collective and improvised rather than like a polished rally.

What does access change for disabled people?

Heder’s answer arrives in the congressional hearing, the film’s most effective and affecting sequence. Witnesses describe denied education, denied employment and the “fire hazard” label, making the hearing a collective account of how policy, professional prejudice and physical design determine who may participate in public life.

The conclusion is direct: access to a building means access to a life.

Earlier details establish the period with precision. An airline employee slaps a “Special Handling” sticker on disabled travelers’ wheelchairs before a flight, as if the chairs were luggage. Early-morning secretaries arrive at the federal building before their bosses. These observations locate 1977 more precisely than the film’s abundant 1970s facial hair.

Califano and the cost of reform

The political conflict centers on Joseph A. Califano Jr., played by Mark Ruffalo, President Carter’s newly appointed secretary of health, education and welfare. Caught between growing public support and reforms costing more than $2 billion, the secretary must balance Carter’s inflation-lowering agenda against the protesters’ demands, a conflict Ruffalo embodies but Heder flattens into repeated indignation.

Ruffalo brings emotional dexterity to the role. Yet Heder makes Califano almost embarrassingly one-note. He sputters and gesticulates in indignation, then whines about his liberal bona fides. The performance carries conviction while the writing denies the secretary the complexity his conflicting obligations demand.

Madeley and the limits of simplification

Colleagues must forcefully remind Heumann that consensus trumps diktat. Madeley, a British actor with spina bifida, makes her wily, fearless and bossy, while that correction reveals how a movement tests the limits of one leader’s authority.

Heumann remains less fully seen. He contracted polio in infancy and appeared in Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht’s 2020 documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. The earlier film supplies useful context, but Being Heumann struggles to reveal the person beyond politics. Madeley’s performance carries the role through that restriction.

Heder’s work carries deep sincerity, though it sometimes muffles the drama. Her 2021 film CODA, about a hearing child of deaf parents, was an unlikely Best Picture Oscar winner. Here, good intentions and extremely on-the-nose musical choices burden a script already drawn to categorical moral judgment.

The R-rated film runs 2 hours 7 minutes, and viewers can watch it on Apple TV. Its rating covers “a smidgen of sex and a whole heap of outrage.” That phrase fits a film whose simplifications do not erase the hearing sequence’s force.

For future films about the movement, that hearing sequence sets the standard: treat access as the condition of participation, not an ornamental concern.