Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2026 TIFF coverage. The film arrives in theaters on November 6 and on Apple TV+ on November 13.
Sian Heder’s Oscar winner CODA felt like a movie out of time. It was the kind of broad crowd-pleaser that Miramax would have released to awards success a couple of decades earlier, which I would argue only triumphed with the Academy as voters were quietly nostalgic for the kind of American indie that disappeared alongside the Weinsteins. It certainly didn’t hold up to scrutiny as a lived-in, authentic account of the deaf community, with its simplistic and reductive attempt to chronicle their many challenges feeling too distractingly like an outsider’s perspective when framed through the audience surrogate of the family’s non-hearing-impaired daughter. For Heder to follow it with a tale more explicitly about disability-rights activism naturally got my alarm bells ringing, but Being Heumann does a far better job balancing its audience-satisfying instincts with an embedded perspective of its characters’ everyday struggles, never allowing the viewer to feel on the outside looking in.
Adapted from disability-rights activist Judith Heumann’s autobiography of the same cringily punning name, Being Heumann isn’t quite the movie that’s been advertised. If you’ve seen the marketing that’s boasted the awkward tagline “based on a true revolution,” you’ll be primed to expect a movie far more triumphant than what’s delivered, which, even with its Miramax-reminiscent prestige tone (you can imagine their awards campaign asking voters to “honor the woman, honor the film”), isn’t naive about the limitations of the rights enshrined into law here. Structured around the 28-day sit-in Heumann (Ruth Madeley) organized at the Department of Health offices in San Francisco in 1977, its narrative is centered on the activist’s quest to ensure Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act would be signed by lawmakers. It was the first federal civil-rights protection for people with disabilities, ensuring no government-funded program would receive money if seen to discriminate, but it hadn’t been ushered into reality years after being written. Successive governments kept kicking the can down the road due to the multi-billion-dollar cost of making every federal building accessible, and nothing about Jimmy Carter’s administration suggested otherwise in its early days.
Even if you weren’t previously aware of the activist’s efforts, you know how this ends; wheelchair-accessible ramps have been commonplace in public spaces for so long, most of us probably haven’t considered there was a fight to get them there in the first place. Naturally, it feels like we’re being primed for a triumphant finale when health secretary Joseph A. Califano (Mark Ruffalo) finally signs the legislation, but Heder never loses sight of the bigger picture. Her protagonist doesn’t pause to celebrate any win, and she asks her audience to follow suit, self-aware that each milestone legal breakthrough doesn’t mark a happy ending and that there are still vast inequalities decades later which need to be reckoned with. It’s a celebration of the woman and fellow activists who helped bring these civil-rights issues to the able-bodied world’s attention, but never positions them as anything more than the first domino which needed to fall. This is an admirably unusual approach for a triumphalist crowd-pleaser, as is the characterization of Heumann as someone who was very difficult even for her fellow advocates to deal with, often asking them to overlook the needs of their own medical conditions for the sake of continuing their protest.
Maybe the biggest success of Being Heumann is how it approaches the topic of disability-rights intersectionality and the difficult conversations that arise from balancing the needs of people with different conditions that seem opposing. Again, we know how these tensions began to be resolved, but there’s a fascination to seeing them dramatized. At their most strongly realized, debates amongst the protesters about how to ensure their disparate needs come to fruition and which other organizations are safe to ally with are reminiscent of the tense administrative town hall meetings between the AIDS activists in Robin Campillo’s BPM. The movie is far too polished and Hollywood to invite further comparisons to that stellar piece of work, but the brief glimpses show that Heder and co-screenwriter Rebekah Taussig are following that film’s lead in ensuring the wide variety of lived-in perspectives are given equal time to be heard.
This approach also extends to the way they feel reluctant to outwardly depict Califano as a cartoonish villain, instead dramatizing him as more of an establishment weasel who is only reluctant to sign legislation because he expects to be fired for greenlighting such a costly program. He’s not opposed to the expansion of civil rights to aid the disabled, but prioritizes his job security over signing the dotted line, constantly arguing that marching in Selma with MLK is proof of his overall good intentions. Judging from the current state of the Democratic party, especially in the recent Joe Biden administration, his platitude-driven inaction has proven influential to a new class of career politicians, and a stronger movie would take a more cynical approach here. It’s refreshing that his characterization is more developed than a one-note villain, reflecting the real bureaucratic obstacles Heumann had to contend with, but this is still a broad crowdpleaser that’ll likely wind up in Barack Obama’s end-of year list; the better version of this story would reflect the stasis in civil rights breakthroughs even after Heumann served in his administration.
Some side characters also feel underdeveloped––Dylan O’Brien’s reporter Evan White goes from dismissive and vaguely prejudiced to an active supporter seemingly offscreen, between scenes––but it’s easy to argue that, like Heumann herself, the movie is ultimately too focused on the bigger picture to afford them much weight. It still manages to be rousing despite these flaws, the familiarity of its comfortable tone making it easier to commend the ways it breaks from the Miramax formula. This isn’t a naive depiction of a triumph against the system, but rather a small, hard-won administrative victory within a system that kept putting up new roadblocks long after it passed. In that regard, it’s about as grounded as a Hollywoodized iteration of this narrative could be.
Being Heumann screened at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival and opens in theaters on November 6 and arrives on Apple TV on November 13.
