Being Heumann
Siân Heder (2026)
The disability rights activist Judith Heumann featured prominently in James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham’s fine documentary Crip Camp, which premiered at Sundance in 2020. Sundance’s accessibility co-ordinator at the time, a friend of Siân Heder, encouraged her to turn Heumann’s life into dramatised film biography. Heder sent a ‘cold’ email to Heumann, the response was warm and work on Being Heumann was soon underway. This London Film Festival screening in the Royal Festival Hall marked the film’s British premiere; LFF director Kirsty Matheson welcomed to the stage Siân Heder, Ruth Madeley, who plays Judy Heumann, and Rob Delaney, who appears in a supporting role. What Matheson, Heder and Delaney (though not Madeley) said by way of introduction are clues, I think, to why Being Heumann is so ropy.
In spring 1977, twenty-nine-year-old Judy Heumann led a nearly month-long occupation of the San Francisco Federal Building. What became known as the Section 504 Sit-In successfully pressured the new Carter administration into implementing the relevant section of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act[1]. As you’d expect, Heumann’s autobiography (Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist) covers the San Francisco sit-in, but it also describes her childhood, education and other early legal battles. Siân Heder’s screen adaptation, which runs over two hours, is almost exclusively a reconstruction of the game-changing sit-in. The screenplay, which Heder wrote with Rebekah Taussig, offers next to no insight into Heumann’s personality or the experiences that shaped it. Since Crip Camp also included a good deal of newsreel footage of the 1977 sit-in, this new version of her story verges on redundant.
As docudrama, Being Heumann is, for the most part, crudely tendentious – especially in its treatment of Joseph A Califano, recently appointed Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in Carter’s government. Califano (Mark Ruffalo) is portrayed as the narrow-minded embodiment of resistance to Section 504’s implementation, and as a blustering buffoon, whose default mode of speech is shouting. When Judy and other sit-in leaders take their case to Washington DC, leaving Kitty Cone (Madeline Delp) in charge back in San Francisco, they gather and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ outside Califano’s home, where he and his wife are asleep in bed. Siân Heder tickles the audience by showing Califano, half-dressed, yelling outrage at the bedroom window then pratfalling, as he hastily tries to exit the house unseen next morning. I qualified the first sentence of this paragraph because on the rare occasions that Califano is credited with a modicum of intelligence or integrity, Heder creates a bit of traction between his political position and Judy Heumann’s campaign – as when Califano is allowed briefly to explain how welfare reform tends to mean different things to different constituencies. Once the campaigners have won the day – forcing his hand to sign into law the relevant regulations – Califano makes a phone call to Judy. During a reasonable, good-humoured conversation, he tells her, ‘I’m not the villain here’. She replies, ‘You are – well, every story needs one’.
The remark reveals on Judy’s part a level of savvy self-awareness that Being Heumann nowhere else implies. It made excellent tactical sense for Judy Heumann to turn Joe Califano into her campaign’s bogeyman. It’s another thing entirely for Siân Heder to reduce him to a cartoon villain, particularly when she’s purporting to tell her story objectively rather than wholly from Judy’s point of view. But then, Heder now appears to see herself as a campaigner – through movies. Her first cinema feature, Tallulah (2016), didn’t have a disability theme, but she told the Festival Hall audience that, once she’d made CODA (2021), she received plenty of suggestions for what her next disability film should be – it seems any other kind of picture was out of the question. CODA, far from subtle but highly engaging, deserved its success. While the story was essentially formulaic, its domestic setting – a nuclear family comprising deaf parents, a deaf son and a hearing daughter – also made it distinctive, and the family relationships were well developed and played. Heder’s latest is, in contrast, both shallow and vague. She worked closely with Judy Heumann, until the latter’s death in March 2023, on developing Being Heumann for the screen. She also assured Heumann that the film’s disabled characters would be played by actual disabled people and has proved as good as her word. Heder gives the impression of being so convinced by her virtuous agenda that she ignored other elements needed to make a decent film.
Several supporting characters undergo stupidly rapid transformations. As the activists prepare to start their sit-in, Evan White (Dylan O’Brien), a San Francisco TV news reporter, buzzes around doing interviews with them. To express himself, Hale Zukas (Andrew Pilkington), who suffers from severe cerebral palsy, uses a pointer attached to a head brace to tap out letters on a communication board and typewriter. (Speech synthesiser technology, as used by, say, Stephen Hawking, was still a thing of the future.) This is useless to the journalist, who hurriedly switches to another activist: ‘At least that one could speak,’ he jokes nastily to his camera crew. When White then follows Judy and her colleagues into the Federal Building and is nice as pie, I guessed he was up to no good, but it turns out he’s been instantly, entirely converted to the activists’ cause: he remains a staunch ally for the rest of the film[2]. When the demonstrators gather outside their house, Joe Califano’s wife (Missy Yager) inanely suggests that if he ignores them, they’ll go away and he bellows a scornful reply. A couple of lines and a brain transplant later, she says to him in a serious, thoughtful tone, ‘Maybe you should listen to them …’
That’s to remind her husband how heartlessly pig-headed he’s being. Judging from the audience noise, many people at this premiere loved the film’s scattershot mugging of Califano. He must be a wrong ‘un; after all, he’s a middle-aged white man in a senior government position. You’d never guess from the Being Heumann narrative that Joseph Califano, during his two-and-a-half years as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, ‘funded the nation’s first free standing hospice … and issued regulations to make Medicare reimbursement available for hospice care’ (Wikipedia). You have to wait until postscript text on the screen, ahead of the closing credits, for Heder to acknowledge that serving in government isn’t always a bad thing: Judy Heumann was Assistant Secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services virtually throughout Bill Clinton’s two terms of office, and for most of Barack Obama’s, as his Special Advisor for International Disability Rights.
Kitty Cone is another character quickly to change her tune. Introduced to Judy, she’s demure and somewhat superior as she asserts her leftist credentials. Plain-speaking Judy sees what Kitty’s wearing round her neck, and says drily, ‘I didn’t think socialists went in for pearls’. This quite takes the wind out of Kitty’s sails – for about thirty seconds. After that, she usually gives as good as she gets from Judy – just as well, given how badly Being Heumann needs a bit of tension among the sitters-in, and Heder’s sketchy picture of who the heroine is. Kitty’s concluding (admiring) description of Judy as ‘the asshole we needed’ is a rare line that punches through. The dialogue is sometimes amazingly sloppy. When she learns that Judy is on hunger strike, Kitty observes, ‘So she’s Gandhi now?’ Not much later, news of the hunger strike is relayed to Joe Califano in Washington. ‘Does she think she’s Gandhi?’ he says – or, rather, shouts. That’s the only difference from Kitty’s reaction, and the joke wasn’t brilliant the first time.
From Siân Heder’s point of view, Ruth Madeley must have been a close-to-ideal candidate to play the lead, even though she’s ten or so years older than Judy Heumann was in the mid-1970s. Heumann became quadriplegic after contracting polio in infancy. Born with spina bifida, Madeley is an ambulatory wheelchair user. She was a disability campaigner well before she was an actor and has been both for some time now. Unlike Heumann, though, she’s neither American nor Jewish. Asked by Kirsty Matheson how she prepared for the role, Madeley talked likeably about the challenge of playing an icon, concealing her own Lancashire accent and learning a Brooklyn one instead. She gives a creditably committed but unvarying performance. The script’s defects are the main reason for that although Ruth Madeley has perhaps also confused single-mindedness with sameness. The lack of variety matters more because Judy so dominates the film’s action.
Badly miscast and awkward in Poor Things (2023) and Mickey 17 (2025), Mark Ruffalo would probably have made a much better job of Joe Califano if Heder had given him a chance. No one else in the non-disabled cast registers much at all. That includes Rob Delaney, even though his role as a sympathetic politician is remarkable in the overall set-up. Delaney told the Festival Hall audience that he prepared to play Congressman George Miller by thinking of ‘my own disabled friends and how they enrich my life’. I wondered how that was an aid to characterisation but realise now I was missing the point, according to how the people involved in Being Heumann see their movie. Just as it would be missing the point to comment on the acting quality of the disabled cast members other than Ruth Madeley: they’re irreproachable because of their disabilities (regardless of what the specific disability may be and how much it might affect, for example, reading lines).
There are a few powerful images. Judy in her wheelchair at the start, battling through heavy New York traffic and giving the finger to drivers hooting at her. Judy gazing up at the many steps of the Capitol in Washington, at the other end of the film. A group of activists using their wheelchairs as a battering ram to break through a government building entrance. But even the images are of subsidiary importance here: Siân Heder and her colleagues clearly take the view that they were engaged in a mission that transcends mere dramatic cinema – and the Director of the London Film Festival agrees with them. Kirsty Matheson instructed us to ‘go out into the world’ to tell others about the ‘inspiring people’ we’d seen on the screen. You might well feel like doing that after watching Crip Camp. By the end of Being Heumann, I’m afraid to say I was anxious to go out into the world just to get away from a duff film.
12 October 2026
[1] Section 504 of the Act provides that ‘No otherwise qualified individual with handicaps in the United States . . . shall, solely by reason of her or his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance….’
[2] On the evidence of Crip Camp, the benighted version of Evan White in Being Heumann, transient as it is, is a travesty.