Sian Heder’s “Being Heumann” is a stellar example of a film that wholeheartedly believes in the power of its story and message, so much so that it knows that all it needs to do is ensure the craft around it amplifies rather than distracts. Heder and her collaborators have been profoundly shaped by the life of disability rights activist Judith Heumann, played with riveting ferocity by Ruth Madeley, and have created a film that invites audiences to appreciate the breadth of her work while indicting the systems of oppression that remain standing.
While it can be easy to get lost in the enormity of the tribulations and the scale of the need, films like this remind us how far we’ve come even as they point to how much more work there is to do. It’s a project that gives its flowers while planting hopeful seeds for the next generation of laborers.
“Being Heumann” is not a cradle-to-grave biopic and, not dissimilar to this year’s “Tony,” it focuses on a particular period of Heumann’s life (her and another activist’s sit-in on Madison Avenue) and how that pivotal moment led to a key piece of legislation being signed that would improve the lives of those disabled. As the film’s opening crawl explains, the first civil rights legislation designed to give rights to people with disabilities (namely, accessibility in public spaces and proper education), called Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, was signed in 1973, but by 1978 it still hadn’t been properly enacted. It was missing a final puzzle piece: the signature of Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano Jr. (Mark Ruffalo). Califano knows signing the section would cost the nation billions; streets would have to be torn up to add curbs, and buildings would need to be restructured to accommodate.
As he puts it, unlike the Civil Rights Movement, where the disenfranchised were asking for “a different seat on the bus,” Judy and her crew want “a whole new bus.” When Judy and a group of other self-proclaimed “radical crips” occupy key Senate buildings nationwide, it becomes a battle of wits between Califiano, believing he’s an immovable object, unaware he’s met an unstoppable and persistent force in the form of Madeley’s Judy.
Much of the film follows the activists who have taken up residence in the federal buildings that house HEW offices, and Heder uses this “downtime” to showcase their vibrant lives. Jamie D. Ramsay’s lensing also serves as a powerful immersion tool, often defying “conventional” framing to let viewers see the world from Judy’s point of view, from her wheelchair. We might see more chests and legs than faces, and these images powerfully bear witness to the whole person.
The camera delights in capturing how the protestors have formed a community for themselves; no one is an island, everyone depends on each other, and there’s grace in this vulnerability. Those who are Deaf have their words graciously spoken aloud, while those who speak have their words signed. Unlike the rugged individualism that has gripped the able-bodied, where people live in their own silos, the community we see has no choice but to depend on one another. As Heder shows, the disability community offers a blueprint for loving those around us better: mutual dependency over the temptation and lie of self-sufficiency. The film also celebrates the messiness of its characters, never tying “good behavior” to one’s worthiness of basic human dignity.
Ruffalo makes Califano a clever foil to Madeley’s Heumann, a man guided by the same kind of stubbornness but also someone who is unaware of his own hypocrisy, where he can’t see he’s become the very institution he pushed back against. When pressed and criticized, he proclaims he was there at the Selma marches and fought for civil rights; he can’t understand how he could ever be “the bad guy.” Thankfully, Ruffalo never tries to play him in a way that should earn us sympathy. People only in positions of power are willing to upend the status quo if there’s a way for it to somehow benefit them, something he begins to realize the longer the protestor’s sit-in lasts.
For a film about the power of not fitting in and defying conventions, there’s a safety to Heder’s film that feels too sanded down and at odds with its protagonists’ embrace of messiness. It hums along at a measured pace, dipping between celebration and tragedy, in a way that can underscore the reality of struggle, how it’s rarely a parabola, and much more of a staggered graph.
That may be Heder simply working within the conventions of the narrative genre as a whole, yet the result sometimes feels as if it never knows whether it wants to be serious or light with its approach. This is most palpable in its portrayal of law enforcement, who are both bumbling comic relief due to their incompetence and brutal forces of nature who wield their power to intimidate rather than protect and serve.
There’s a famed comic panel in the 1986 comic The Dark Knight Returns where Batman takes a gun, snaps it in two, and says, “This is the weapon of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it.” “Being Heumann,” on a similar wavelength, advocates our collective need to unlearn a way of being that prioritizes what’s easy to pursue over what’s just.
While Judy’s work is righteous, that doesn’t mean she’s without flaws; she often speaks for the whole movement and believes her role as leader outweighs the collective’s efforts. Her journey is realizing she has adopted the enemy’s weapons in her own work and that her activism needs interrogation and dismantling. The film is for the battles won, the ones yet to be fought, and dares us to imagine and ask for a better world. Must the rhythms of our lives be the way they are, and can we use our energies not to keep building what we know doesn’t work but dare to imagine something better?
This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival. It will be released in select theaters on November 6, 2026.
