Being Heumann review – stirring biopic of a pioneering disability rights campaigner

Heartfelt real-life drama follows the late activist whose groundbreaking struggle helped build a rainbow alliance with gay action groups and the Black Panthers

The remarkable story of the late US disability rights campaigner and wheelchair user Judy Heumann – pronounced “human” – is the subject of this heartfelt if Hollywoodised story from director and co-writer Sian Heder, based on Heumann’s own 2020 memoir of the same title. In the lead is British actor Ruth Madeley, who has spina bifida and is herself a disability rights activist; she gives a forthright, smart, sympathetic performance.

Heumann’s finest hour was to get the federal government to sign into law Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, whose accessibility provisions had been resisted by Nixon, Ford and then Carter. In 1977, Heumann led a guerrilla sit-in occupation of the San Francisco Health, Education and Welfare offices, her group being a rainbow alliance including gay action groups and the Black Panthers. Secretary of State for Health Joseph Califano sensationally conceded and signed the bill that he and the political establishment had obstructed for years. He is played by Mark Ruffalo, whose nice-guy persona and one-note performance of exasperated detachment does however rather obscure the fact that in real life, Califano at first personally authorised moves to starve the protesters out. In the movie, this grim political decision is not explicitly dramatised.

The movie does well, however, to show that playing nice, being polite and submitting to the pity and condescension of the authorities was never going to get the campaigners anywhere. There are pertinent debates within the group between deaf and otherwise disabled people about what their priorities are, and the film is funny and forthright about disabled people’s sexuality. Wheelchair user Madeline Delp plays Heumann’s comrade Kitty Cone, and Dylan O’Brien plays real-life TV reporter Evan White who embedded himself in the protest. Jon Beavers plays Heumann’s friend and ally Jim Pechin, though the drama escalates that friendship to romance. It’s a high-energy ensemble film about the messy business of challenging the status quo.