Following a Best Picture winner is no enviable task, but Siân Heder has never seemed particularly interested in taking the easy route. With Being Heumann, her first feature since CODA, the writer-director turns her attention to disability rights activist Judy Heumann and a landmark moment in American civil rights history, delivering a film that is rousing, funny, furious and refreshingly uninterested in sanding down the people at its centre.
There’s perhaps no better introduction to Judy (played with magnificent, if occasionally infuriating, fire by Ruth Madeley) than the film’s opening moments. New York, 1972. Judy and her fellow activists are attempting to draw attention to the barriers disabled people encounter simply moving through the city, only to be ignored by seemingly everyone around them. Frustrated, Judy tells the group to put her in the street. Traffic stops. Horns blare. Judy responds by proudly raising her middle finger.
Cue title card.
It’s cheeky, confrontational and immediately establishes exactly what kind of film Being Heumann intends to be.
Rather than condensing decades of activism into a conventional cradle-to-grave biopic, Heder and co-writer Rebekah Taussig concentrate primarily on the 1977 Section 504 sit-in in San Francisco. Though Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act had been passed years earlier, regulations enforcing protections for disabled people remained unsigned. Judy and a coalition of activists responded by occupying a federal building, beginning a historic 26-day protest that ultimately forced Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo) to act.
It’s an inspired structural choice. By essentially trapping us inside the building alongside its protesters, Heder transforms what could have been a respectful but predictable history lesson into something considerably more immediate. There are logistical disasters, ideological disagreements, dwindling supplies, political manoeuvring, a sex tent, weed, hunger, exhaustion and plenty of people getting increasingly pissed off with one another.
This is activism without the commemorative plaque.
That distinction proves crucial. Being Heumann understands that reverence can sometimes be its own form of simplification. Judy is unquestionably a remarkable figure, but the film has little interest in presenting her as a saint. She’s impatient, abrasive, funny, selfish and capable of bulldozing the very people standing beside her. Madeley embraces every contradiction.
It’s a tremendous performance.
She captures Judy’s distinctive Brooklyn cadence and formidable presence, but the achievement goes considerably deeper than impersonation. Madeley gives us someone who has learned that being agreeable rarely convinces institutions to surrender power. Her Judy knows how to command a room, manipulate a press opportunity and weaponise other people’s discomfort, yet Madeley continually allows glimpses of the emotional cost underneath that armour.
Importantly, the film never suggests that Judy alone is the disability rights movement.
One of its sharpest exchanges comes when fellow activist Kitty Cone (a terrific Madeline Delp) challenges Judy’s tendency to behave as though her voice represents everyone in the building. It punctures the seductive simplicity of the Great Person biopic and allows Being Heumann to acknowledge something considerably more interesting: marginalised communities aren’t monoliths simply because they share an enemy.
That extends to the film’s representation of disability itself. Wheelchair users, Blind protesters, Deaf activists and people with a variety of disabilities occupy the same space, but their needs and perspectives aren’t treated as interchangeable. Brad Lomax (Antwan Tolliver), a Black Panther Party member with multiple sclerosis, further expands the film’s understanding of the intersection between disability and race, particularly when the Black Panthers become essential allies to the occupation.
The ensemble is exceptional, and Heder’s commitment to casting disabled performers isn’t merely admirable practice; it fundamentally changes the texture of the movie. Madeley has spina bifida, Delp is herself a wheelchair user and disability rights advocate, and performers including Daniel Durant, Charlie Rush-Reese and Andrew Pilkington bring their lived experiences alongside their considerable talents.
The result is a film where disability never feels observed from the outside.
That’s especially apparent in the humour. Being Heumann is frequently very funny, but never because disability itself is positioned as the joke. These characters tease each other, flirt, swear, smoke, argue and have sex. A wonderfully recurring piece of advice about Judy needing to show some cleavage and cry her way through a press conference gets funnier every time it resurfaces.
That sexuality is particularly welcome. Judy’s flirtation with fellow activist Jim Pechin (Jon Beavers) is playful, physical and genuinely sexy, something that shouldn’t feel remotely revolutionary but still does given cinema’s long history of either desexualising disabled characters or treating intimacy as another obstacle to overcome. Heder simply allows Judy to be desired.
And that speaks to the film’s broader philosophy. Being Heumann refuses the familiar cinematic tendency to transform disabled existence into an inspirational experience designed primarily for non-disabled audiences.
When television reporter Evan White (Dylan O’Brien) tells Judy that people find her inspiring, her response interrogates the usefulness of that sentiment: inspired to actually do something, or merely inspired?
It’s a quietly devastating distinction.
O’Brien’s Evan could easily have become the audience surrogate through whom this history is explained, but Heder wisely keeps him on the perimeter. He can help. He can learn. He can use his position as a reporter to amplify what is happening. But this isn’t his awakening story.
Similarly, Ruffalo’s Califano isn’t rendered as some snarling embodiment of prejudice. His resistance is arguably more frustrating because it is so bureaucratically ordinary. He considers budgets, political consequences and institutional realities whilst the people affected by those calculations are sitting inside a government building demanding recognition of their basic rights. Ruffalo smartly underplays him, locating the danger not necessarily in outright hatred, but in the ease with which supposedly reasonable people can rationalise injustice when fixing it becomes inconvenient.
Heder and Taussig occasionally succumb to the conventions they’re otherwise resisting. There are speeches engineered to stir an audience, and the extended occupation inevitably causes portions of the middle act to feel repetitive. But whenever Being Heumann threatens to become overly polished, its characters drag it back towards something messier and more truthful.
That culminates in one of the film’s most affecting sequences, when individual protesters testify about their lives and the barriers imposed upon them. It doesn’t beg for sympathy. It demands recognition.
And perhaps that’s what makes Being Heumann so powerful. The film isn’t arguing that disabled people should be granted access because they’re brave, exceptional or inspirational. It’s arguing that access is a civil right. That people shouldn’t have to prove themselves worthy of participating in their own communities.
It’s an idea that sounds embarrassingly obvious until the film reminds us just how fiercely people had to fight for it.
Heder could have emerged from CODA and made virtually anything. Instead, she has used that industry capital to centre a chapter of American history that remains startlingly unfamiliar to many audiences, telling it through a sprawling ensemble of disabled performers who are allowed to be complicated, horny, hilarious, difficult, frightened, selfish, generous and angry.
In other words, they’re allowed to be people.
Madeley is extraordinary at the centre of it all, delivering a performance that deserves to dramatically expand her profile. But Being Heumann ultimately understands something Judy herself had to negotiate: movements are bigger than the individuals who become their public faces.
There is victory here, but Heder refuses the comfort of pretending victory means completion. The work didn’t end when the protesters left the building. Nearly fifty years later, it still hasn’t.
Joyous, defiant and tremendously entertaining, Being Heumann is no solemn history lesson. It’s closer to a protest movie with the pulse of a hangout comedy – alive with the wonderfully messy personalities of people who realised that waiting politely wasn’t getting them anywhere.
So they stopped waiting.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Being Heumann is screening as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, running between September 10th and 20th, 2026. For more information, head to the official site here.
Being Heumann is scheduled for release on Apple TV on November 13th, 2026.
