‘Being Heumann’ Showcases Ruth Madeley Leading Siân Heder’s Honest, Rousing Fight for Disability Rights
I’m going to lose some readers right away, but I must state this: CODA deserved its Best Picture win. It’s still my favorite film of its release year, and I’m proud that the very first thing I watched back in 2021 was a “Sundance darling”. I hadn’t seen Siân Heder’s directorial debut with Tallulah, so I didn’t know what to expect from her sophomore movie. By the end of it, I already suspected I’d found my favorite film of the entire festival, but I was pleasantly surprised it ended up being my favorite of the year too.
So, naturally, a new Heder flick was going to be an event for me. I went into Being Heumann completely blind, knowing nothing beyond the title, with one simple hope: another banger.
A law nobody would sign
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act became law in 1973, promising that disabled people couldn’t be shut out of any program receiving federal money. Four years later, it still hasn’t been put into practice because the regulations that would give it teeth are sitting unsigned on the desk of Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo), the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Judy Heumann (Ruth Madeley), a wheelchair user since a childhood case of polio and an activist who’s been fighting this fight for years, is out of patience. In 1977, she and a scrappy coalition of disabled protesters and allies walk into the federal building in San Francisco and refuse to leave until somebody in power does what the law already says.
An unrepentant hero worth rallying behind
The thing I loved most about CODA is the thing I love most here. Being Heumann is exceptionally authentic across the board. Heder fills the ensemble with actually disabled actors, and she treats the real people they’re playing exactly as that: people. The whole movie drips with honesty. There’s a passionate, intimate, real hand and vision behind every scene, trying to show something that should be obvious and somehow still isn’t: disabled people are like any other human being. They have feelings and thoughts, hurdles and goals, dreams and desires, good sides and bad ones.
Small choices make that point better than any lecture would. One of the protesters lived like “everyone else” until the day they got run over. Another was “normal” until a degenerative disease caught up with him and put him in a wheelchair. Being Heumann doesn’t make a big deal out of either story. They’re just part of who these people are, which is exactly how it should be — for a lot of people, disability arrives in the middle of a life that was heading somewhere else.
Then there’s Judy herself. Madeley is astonishingly powerful in this role, and she’s captivating for the entire runtime. What impressed me most is how she can be two people at once: someone you’d follow into any building in the country, and someone you’d be completely tired of after an hour in the same room. Judy is relentless. She pushes through every obstacle and every political maneuver in her way, and in the process, she often forgets that the people beside her have their own difficulties and their own limits. Other characters call her “difficult.” Some just call her an “asshole”. That’s not something you usually hear in a biopic that clearly admires its subject, and I love that Heder lets it stand. The real Judy subtitled her memoir as “unrepentant,” and Being Heumann honors that word instead of sanding it down. “Heroes” in these movies tend to come without a single bad trait. This one has plenty, and she’s more inspiring because of them, not despite them.
Kitty Cone (Madeline Delp) is the perfect counterweight. She and Judy want the exact same thing, but Kitty is quieter and more strategic, and Delp shines in her first-ever feature role without ever fighting Madeley for the spotlight. That pairing is where Being Heumann gets genuinely interesting about leadership, especially a woman’s leadership. A woman who won’t back down gets labeled “difficult” much faster than a man would, and the film never pretends Judy’s way is the nicer one. It’s simply the way that worked. If Judy had been more like Kitty, I don’t think they would have won. The movement needed both of them.
Even the “antagonist” breaks the usual mold. These biopics love a cartoonish villain, someone who conveniently ignores every real problem with doing something that’s obviously right but complicated. Ruffalo’s Califano isn’t that. We don’t get to know much about him as a person, but we understand that he isn’t actually against the regulations. He’s worried about what signing them would imply: the cost, the taxpayers’ money, and, sure, his own position. He has a job and a family. Nobody wants to give up their own life for someone else’s cause.
That tension is the heart of the movie. Califano’s side frames accessibility as charity, something generous the government might eventually be able to afford. Judy’s side frames it as a right that was already written into law and simply never honored. The difference sounds small, but charity can be postponed, budgeted, and taken back. A right is owed! Being Heumann doesn’t hide that implementing accessible laws is hard, and it doesn’t pretend the bill comes cheap. It just insists we have to try because we’re all human, and human rights are basic rights.
What makes all of that land isn’t the politics, though. It’s the stairs, the sidewalks, the bathrooms, public transportation… Heder keeps showing the simple things that can take hours to find a workaround for: a flight of steps with no ramp or elevator, public transport with no room for a wheelchair, a bathroom nobody in a chair can use, a sidewalk curb that might as well be a wall. Everyone knows these obstacles exist. Most of us just don’t think about them in our day-to-day until a film like this puts them right in front of us.
The occupation is where Being Heumann spends most of its time, and I really like that focus. There are barely any narrative detours, as the movie puts the spotlight on the work and the challenges these people face to get their message across, and I can see some viewers finding that boring. I found it fascinating and truly inspiring. These are people with extremely challenging conditions, putting their health and their lives at risk for almost a full month, often unable to eat, drink, shower, or go to the bathroom properly. Most non-disabled people wouldn’t last more than a couple of days in there.
Is it predictable? Pretty much. Being Heumann is familiar and formulaic, and if you’ve seen a handful of true-story underdog dramas, you’ll know where most of the beats are going. The middle act gets a tad repetitive, and there are quite a few speeches. In the end, though, I felt every one of those speeches was relevant and important.
It’s also a lot of fun, which I didn’t see coming from a movie about a sit-in. Being Heumann is brilliantly diverse and inclusive in the most natural manner, treating everyone inside that building as completely normal… as they are. Dark humor flies around constantly. They laugh at each other, tease each other, and stage silly wheelchair races through the halls. Being disabled doesn’t stop anyone from having fun, being funny, or being sexually desired, and the film never acts like any of that should surprise us. It’s exhilarating, warm, and shocking, sometimes within the same scene.
It helps that the people in that building don’t all think alike, either. The coalition brings together wheelchair users, Deaf protesters, people with degenerative illnesses, and allies like the Black Panthers, and their needs don’t always line up. What makes life easier for one person can make it harder for another, and Heder lets those disagreements breathe instead of flattening everyone into one inspirational crowd. Disabled people aren’t a mere monolith. Solidarity here is something these characters have to keep working at, inside a building that was never designed with any of them in mind.
Final thoughts on Being Heumann
Being Heumann is a rousing, generous, and thought-provoking true story, and Siân Heder’s passionate, intimate vision makes it feel deeply authentic from start to finish, thanks in large part to a cast filled with actually disabled actors. Ruth Madeley is astonishingly powerful as Judy Heumann, a leader the movie refuses to turn into a flawless hero, and Madeline Delp shines as her quieter, more strategic counterpart. Mark Ruffalo’s Califano is far from the usual comic villain; the focused structure keeps everything on the fight itself, and the everyday obstacles, dark humor, wheelchair races, and unapologetic desire make these characters feel like real people instead of symbols. It’s familiar, and there are plenty of speeches, but I felt every one of them mattered. One of those films everyone should take the time to watch, learn from, and allow themselves to feel inspired by.
Being Heumann is in theaters now and streaming on Apple TV on November 13th! Are you excited for this film? Share your thoughts on social media and tag @bsb.insider to keep the conversations going!
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