On my way to Toronto, I wheeled my suitcase toward the taxi that would take me to the airport, finding the curb cut in the sidewalk so that my luggage could roll seamlessly down to the street. What a nice convenience provided by municipal governments all over the United States, one that so many of us take wholly for granted.
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But there was a fierce struggle for their existence, once deemed a radical, far too costly alteration to the nation’s infrastructure. (The same was argued about ramps and other means of accessibility.) They now exist ubiquitously across the country largely because of the tireless efforts of disability rights activists like Judith Heumann, one of the most prominent leaders of that cause from the 1970s until her death in 2023. Those who’ve seen Heumann in the Netflix documentary Crip Camp will remember her wit and tartness and zeal. That spark has now been bluntly captured in writer-director Sian Heder’s Being Heumann, a biopic covering the first major political act of Heumann’s long war on government indifference.
Being Heumann is Heder’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Coda, a film about a mixed family of deaf and hearing people significant in film history for centering disability so prominently and being handsomely rewarded for it. That is a woefully rare occurrence in Hollywood, though Coda (and its contemporary, Sound of Metal) has had a noticeable impact on deaf representation on screen in the years since. Heder would thus seem the ideal steward for another film highlighting the lives and passions of physically marginalized people, who for so terribly long were essentially cut off from the rest of society because they lacked safe, proper access to public spaces.
In Being Heumann, Heder can’t invent a story wholesale, as she could with Coda. There is a historical record to follow. How closely must the facts be adhered to, and how much can you fudge for the sake of dramatic intrigue? Heder has about half shrewdly approached that difficult equation.
The middle stretch of the film is its strongest, covering the nearly month-long 1977 sit-in at the San Francisco office of the US health, education and welfare department. (That’s the agency, since renamed, now run by Robert F Kennedy Jr). Heumann leads that charge with stubbornness and ingenuity, and it’s a procedural lark seeing how her guerrilla protest plays out, rousing sympathy from the public and consternating government officials.
Here Heder applies the same tactic that worked in Coda, adding some sass and saltiness to further humanize characters (based, of course, on real people) who might otherwise only exist as pious avatars of identity. She lets the picture get shaggy, which appropriately captures the smoky, late-70s vibe of these hippy-ish protesters. Heder’s ensemble, perhaps the largest cast of disabled actors this critic has ever seen, grooves on this energy, having poignant fun with the anarchy of it all.
Eventually, though, things have to get more serious, because these are serious matters, and Heder’s film flattens into something far more generic. If only Being Heumann held its cool, rebellious pose for a bit longer, the spirit of the movement might have been truly conjured up. Instead, things deflate into a competent recitation of facts, into a sturdy but plain message delivery system.
To play Heumann, the actor Ruth Madeley successfully transforms her Mancunian accent into a Brooklyn one, and often persuasively expresses the grit and determination of a grand hero of the cause. The trouble is, that tenacity is really the only level – beyond a brief romantic interlude and a few moments of doubt – that Heder has given Madeley to play. We know frustratingly little of what personally drives Heumann, where this principled fury is sourced from in her own personal history. I suppose Heder didn’t want to go all the way back to Heumann’s childhood, in the manner of so many clunky and overly explanatory biopics, but Madeley and the audience need more to grab on to, in order to understand Heumann as more than a mere emblem, mighty as that emblem may be.
Lending some Hollywood glow to the proceedings are Mark Ruffalo as a government official steadfastly resisting the demands of Heumann’s group, and Dylan O’Brien as a local reporter who experiences a (rather fast) change of heart and mind as he covers the story. (Rob Delaney, Ray Fisher and Roberta Colindrez also appear.) Their presence lends a merry, “let’s chip in and do our part” bonhomie to the film, but the focus here is mostly on the more unknown actors, the ones presumably channeling some lived experience to play their parts. I was particularly taken by Rio Finnegan as a hot-headed soldier of the revolution and Madeline Delp as Heumann’s kinder, gentler deputy. They, and many others, do fine work that serves as a clarion reminder that there are myriad disabled actors out there who are shamefully underemployed.
If such lessons are learned from Being Heumann, then it has done an admirable service. But as narrative art, the film is less than inspiring. One can’t help but think back to another San Francisco-set biopic about a grinding fight against the system, Gus Van Sant’s Milk. That film blends docudrama rabble-rousing with something more soulful, more textured and idiosyncratic. Such things are possible. Heder stops short of that, only letting her film go as far as polite homage to a figure well worth honoring. Maybe that’s enough, and yet one still craves a lot more.
Being Heumann is premiering at the Toronto film festival and will be released in cinemas on 6 November and on Apple TV on 13 November
