Being Heumann review: Sian Heder's biopic of disability rights pioneer

Sian Heder's "Being Heumann" dramatises the 1977 San Francisco sit-in that forced the US federal government to sign Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. The film stars British actor Ruth Madeley as Judy Heumann, the late disability rights campaigner whose name is pronounced "human".

Heder directs and co-writes, adapting Heumann's own 2020 memoir of the same title. The Guardian's review calls the result "heartfelt if Hollywoodised" — a real-life drama that honors its subject while smoothing some of her struggle's harder edges.

Madeley, who has spina bifida and is herself a disability rights activist, gives what the review describes as "a forthright, smart, sympathetic performance". Her personal connection to the material anchors the film. It's a rare mainstream lead role for a disabled actor playing a disabled historical figure.

Who was Judy Heumann?

Heumann, a wheelchair user, became the most prominent US disability rights campaigner of her generation. Her finest hour, per the review, was getting the federal government to enact Section 504, whose accessibility provisions (rules requiring federally funded bodies to accommodate disabled people) had been resisted by three successive presidents: Nixon, Ford and then Carter.

In 1977 she led a guerrilla sit-in occupation of the San Francisco Health, Education and Welfare offices. Her group formed what the review calls a rainbow alliance, including gay action groups and the Black Panthers — an unusually broad coalition for 1970s American protest politics.

Secretary of State for Health Joseph Califano eventually conceded and signed the bill he and the political establishment had obstructed for years.

What does the film leave out?

Mark Ruffalo plays Califano, but the review takes issue with the casting. His "nice-guy persona and one-note performance of exasperated detachment", the critic writes, "rather obscures the fact that in real life, Califano at first personally authorised moves to starve the protesters out".

The film does not explicitly dramatise that grim political decision. It's the sharpest note in the review: the Hollywood treatment softens the very conflict that made Heumann's victory significant. The sit-in succeeded against a government willing to wait the protesters out — a fact the biopic sets aside.

Why it still matters

Heumann died in March 2023, and "Being Heumann" arrives as a mainstream portrait of a campaigner whose name is far less familiar than the law she forced into being. Every ramp, curb cut and accessible federal building traces back in part to Section 504 — and to the 1977 occupation Heder now puts on screen.