‘Being Heumann’ Review: A Sit-In That Refuses to Leave Quietly

‘Being Heumann’ arrives on Apple TV on November 13 after a limited theatrical run that began November 6. It is Siân Heder’s follow up to ‘CODA’, the film that won her a Best Picture Oscar. This time she adapts Judy Heumann’s own memoir with co-writer Rebekah Taussig, and she chooses to dramatize one stretch of Heumann’s life instead of the whole of it.

The year is 1977, and Heumann, played by Ruth Madeley, has spent five years waiting for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act to be signed. Joseph Califano, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, played by Mark Ruffalo, keeps dodging the issue. So Heumann and her allies take over the federal building in San Francisco. What begins as a one night protest stretches into a 26 day occupation.

This is where the movie earns its keep. The inside of that building is a joy to spend time in, because the protesters are allowed to be messy, funny and stubborn instead of solemn symbols of courage. Watching a crowd of people with wildly different access needs invent solutions to problems the government should have solved years earlier is the film at its liveliest.

Madeley is the reason to press play. She plays Heumann as impatient, quick witted and impossible to wave off, and she holds the screen even in the quieter scenes with Jon Beavers as her friend Jim Pechin. Madeline Delp as Kitty Cone, Ray Fisher as Black Panther member Chuck Jackson, Roberta Colindrez as Joni Breves and Dylan O’Brien as the sympathetic TV reporter Evan White round out an ensemble that feels lived in. Casting disabled actors across much of that group gives the occupation a texture that no amount of clever directing could fake.

The weaknesses are real, though. Ruffalo’s Califano is written as a stiff, exasperated bureaucrat with very little dimension, and the script leans on an inspirational beat sheet whose turns you can see coming a block away. After so much effort inside that building, the payoff also arrives quicker than it should, which leaves the climax a little flat.

Even so, the shape of the movie is smart. Skipping the cradle to grave biography and staying inside one fight keeps the pace brisk, and it lets the story feel urgent instead of embalmed. The 127 minutes move well, and the film never lets you forget that a single victory inside one building was only a piece of a much larger struggle.

I also admired how frank and funny it is about the romantic and sexual lives of disabled people, a subject mainstream movies still tiptoe around. The jokes land because they come from character, not from a desire to educate. Moments of flirtation and friction sit comfortably beside the political stakes, and that balance is harder to pull off than it looks.

I left ‘Being Heumann’ moved and grinning, a little frustrated by its tidy formula but won over by its warmth, its sit-in energy and Madeley’s commanding turn. It is not a flawless biopic, yet it is a generous and rousing one that I would happily recommend to anyone with an Apple TV subscription and a free evening. I give it 8 out of 10.

Let me know in the comments whether you agree with my verdict on ‘Being Heumann’ and Ruth Madeley’s star turn.