Being Heumann is in theaters now and debuts November 13 on Apple TV.
Disability activist Judith Heumann has the perfect name for a story about forcing politicians to acknowledge the humanity of an underclass. More perfect still is the title of her memoir, Being Heumann, which CODA director Sian Heder turns into a straightforward but occasionally rousing biopic revolving around a political sit-in, a film whose authentic casting is a vital part of its form.
Beginning with a failed streetside protest in 1972, the movie zips forward several years into the work of a bustling coalition with busy offices. The year is 1977, and the wheelchair-using Heumann, aka Judy (Ruth Madeley, a wheelchair-user herself), is among a group of several protesters furious with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s (HEW) preening secretary Joseph Califano Jr. (Mark Ruffalo) for refusing to sign a vital equality act into law. Some in Judy’s camp are blind or Deaf; others are para- or quadriplegic; and a small handful are able-bodied allies from queer or racial advocacy groups like the Black Panthers. As they gather outside the HEW offices in San Francisco, Judy makes impromptu demands for a building occupation until Califano Jr. signs the aforementioned legislation, referred to as “Section 504.”
There is, however, a moral wrinkle to Judy’s plan. Her cohorts soon discover that she packed a toothbrush; it was always her plan to enter the building and stay overnight. That the fierce equality advocate refused to share this with her protesters makes her self-absorbed in a particularly compelling way, as her eyes are gradually opened to the ways in which her actions do or do not gel with her fellow protesters. Among them is the fellow polio-stricken Ed Roberts (Michael Patrick Thornton), who can’t join this leveling-up of Judy’s praxis because he needs to sleep in an iron lung. Roberts’ role is therefore minor, but the frankness with which Thornton performs it makes him an absolute must-watch.
This is true for practically the entire cast, beginning with Judy herself, who Madeley imbues with a fearsome, acerbic, and headstrong attitude that slowly reveals deep insecurities as her fellow advocates — including soft-spoken organization newcomer Kitty Cone (Madeline Delp) — push back on her methods during the occupation, yielding entertaining skirmishes. The movie’s tone, therefore, veers between challenging, comedic, and broadly uplifting, as its focus falls on numerous in-group debates and conversations while the activist contingent waits for the targets of their protests to respond.
While the film occasionally leans towards prescriptive and verbose — its scenes often pivot around characters having to explain their views in detail — this is part and parcel of Heder’s particular telling, which aims to bring crisscrossing political debates about disability activism to the fore. Being Heumann is at its most interesting when its many heroic subjects disagree, a prickliness which eventually leads to a greater cooperation down the line.
The real sit-in lasted nearly four weeks, and Heder details every challenge along the way as able-bodied allies like Dylan O’Brien’s news reporter, Evan White, and Ray Fisher’s Panther member, Chuck Jackson, embed themselves with the group to assist and observe while supportive politicians like Congressman George Miller (Rob Delaney) assist from the outside. This, too, ends up a meta-textual piece of the movie’s telling; these relatively well-known actors are the kind that get smaller-budgeted movies green-lit, and that they cede space to the central cast feels in and of itself like an act of allyship.
The ensemble is made up of relative unknowns, and that their own disabilities are in line with those of their characters serves a dual purpose. The first is verisimilitude: Freed from the constraints of having to concentrate on “performing” disability, they each bring a remarkable and personable realism to their roles, including Andrew Pilkington as Hale Zukas, a nonverbal activist with cerebral palsy who communicates with a helmet-mounted pointer and a board full of letters. That he spells out each word slowly is no hurdle to the character’s sharp, sarcastic wit (“Disability is not a tragedy,” he spells, as a fellow protester interprets for the larger group. “It is a tremendous hassle.”). Similarly, when we catch glimpses of Judy’s morning routine, involving being helped to the bathroom by an attendant who shows up rather late, her understandably rankled attitude takes center stage, both fleshing her out as a character while fueling her advocacy in the first place.
The second and equally important purpose of casting disabled actors is as an act of equity. Section 504 may be about ramps for wheelchair-users, readers for the blind, interpreters for the Deaf, and so on — a costly endeavor according to Califano Jr. — but its real goal is equal access to jobs and education. Nearly every character on screen occupies the HEW building because they’ve been denied opportunities owing to their disabilities (Judy, for instance, was denied her teaching license). So, granting these roles to disabled actors, which they might ordinarily lose to able-bodied peers who have had more chances to bolster their résumés, is the movie putting its money where its mouth is. Califano Jr. complains about being asked to remake the world, but the production does it with ease.
Granting these roles to disabled actors, which they might ordinarily lose to able-bodied peers who have had more chances to bolster their résumés, is the movie putting its money where its mouth is.
Since the film is a large ensemble piece, Heder makes minor alterations to traditional framing; her eye-level medium and group shots are much closer to the ground to accommodate the wheelchair-using cast, and the frame expands laterally to capture them. These are only minor adjustments, but they speak to the fluidity of Heder’s filmmaking, wherein she tells broad and familiar stories by changing their packaging ever-so-slightly. Similarly, her Best Picture winner, CODA, not only casts real Deaf adults in major roles, but the movie’s editing follows the rhythm of their signed dialogue rather than the traditional beats of spoken words. And, much like CODA, Being Heumann doesn’t shy away from the full dimensions of is disabled subjects, including their sex lives; in the process, it makes the sit-in seem pretty fun and hedonistic.
Heder’s minor departures help contort the screen to include a wider array of people within the bounds of a traditionally mawkish but no less effective political biopic. Granted, a handful of beats remain too obvious and on-the-nose to really work — like the out-of-place use of the Ramones’ “Judy is a Punk” accompanied by slow-motion wheelchair-rolling — but the movie is ultimately a crowd-pleasing delight, which is the sort of thing Heder excels at making.