Nothing About Us Without Us, on the Big Screen

“Being Heumann,” the new film from “CODA” director Siân Heder, begins in the middle of a busy New York street. Judith Heumann (Judy to her friends) is navigating her way through the city in a wheelchair, unable to get onto sidewalks or cross traffic safely. Finally she’s had enough, and, moving herself to the middle of a car lane, wheels herself forward while waving a middle finger at the city bus honking behind her. 

The next thing we see of Judy, she’s at a small protest to pass Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the first ever federal legislation guaranteeing rights of access and freedom from discrimination to Americans with disabilities. Unable to muster meaningful attention on the sidewalk, she spontaneously gets her comrades out into the middle of the street to block traffic. Horns honk once again.

Often referred to as “the mother of the disability rights movement,” Heumann was an instrumental force in the passage of legislation protecting the rights of disabled Americans to access and accommodation. At 18 months, she contracted polio, which resulted in her using a wheelchair for much of her life. Her path to activism came during her time in university in the late ’60s, and accelerated after she was denied a New York teaching license, with the board citing her disability as the reason. She sued, the case was settled, and she got her license, working as a teacher for three years before turning to activism and community support full time.

Taking a page out of Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film “Selma,” Heder’s movie eschews the usual trappings of a biopic to instead focus on its hero’s greatest moment of direct action. Like “Selma,” “Being Heumann” melds a palatable style of mainstream, inspirational moviemaking with a surprisingly complex portrait of activist organizing, including the combative personalities involved, and often their ideological and tactical disagreements. What these films lack in refined artistry, they make up for in reorienting popular history toward complexity and moral conviction.

“Being Heumann” centers on the Section 504 sit-ins of 1977, which occupied multiple U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare buildings around the country, with the main sit-in occurring at the HEW building in San Francisco. Section 504 was passed in a bill by Congress five years earlier, and now with the newly elected Carter administration in charge, associated regulations still have yet to be signed. Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. Lasting for 26 days, the sit-ins eventually forced the government’s hand, leading HEW Secretary Joseph Califano, played in the film by a hilariously annoyed and exhausted Mark Ruffalo, to finally sign the regulations.

As seen in the film, over the course of those five years, the small rally in the first scene has grown into a complex organization for disability rights, with an office, a set of protest strategies, mutual aid operations and close friendships evident in the activists’ often hilarious and self-deprecating banter. At the center of it all is Judy, played with great tenacity by British actress Ruth Madeley in a tremendously magnetic performance. For years, Judy has been organizing for disability rights, including co-founding the New York-based Disabled in Action, which helped get Section 504 passed in the first place. Now working in California, Judy has been collaborating with a wide network of activists to put Section 504 to work for the disabled.

“Being Heumann” ends up a lively depiction of direct action as a means of both community formation and political agitation. It’s as important in the film that the disabled people occupying a floor of the San Francisco HEW building set up a sex tent and smoke an endless supply of (Black Panther-supplied) grass as it is that they cook up plans to influence Califano. Indeed, it’s the connection between human beings, their understanding of everyone’s mutual destiny, that drives Judy and her fellow activists. That Judy can be abrasive — it takes her a while, but she eventually admits she can be an asshole — makes her a great activist. What makes her a great leader is being challenged by the likes of fellow Bay Area activist Kitty Cone (Madeline Delp), a more soft-spoken and soft-hearted person who acts as an important friend and foil for Judy’s more blasé tendencies, reminding her the movement isn’t just about her, that Judy cannot speak for everyone.

As the protest goes on, the realities of holding a sit-in long term quickly bear down, particularly on the disabled, many of whom simply don’t have the physical ability to withstand such a demanding form of activism. Ed Roberts (Michael Patrick Thornton), one of the main organizers of the protest that led to the sit-in, was disabled by polio in his youth and sleeps at night in an iron lung. Thornton plays Roberts with a sense of mission, but also sadness at his inability to put his body on the line like Judy and some of the others. His sense of fulfillment comes later, when he fully embraces his role as the man on the outside, coordinating communications, relief and more for the occupiers. Still, over time, more and more people exit the building to take care of their own needs while still trying to support the sit-in. 

In the meantime, the sit-in itself becomes a hodgepodge of disabled activists, including people in wheelchairs, deaf people, blind people and more, along with several able-bodied allies working in solidarity, including representatives of the Black Panthers like Chuck Johnson (Ray Fisher) and a friendly journalist played by Dylan O’Brien. On the outside, they also get help from U.S. Rep. George Miller, played by Rob Delaney. It’s this networking and community formation that sustain the protesters through various setbacks, hardening their resolve even as internal tensions over the protest’s goals and tactics rise.

In other ways, “Being Heumann” is fairly standard. The film is produced by Apple, and it has all the sheen of a modern streaming movie, with production design all a little too perfect and camerawork that’s good enough but rarely inspired. The screenplay, co-written by Heder and Rebekah Taussig, is intelligently constructed and gives great voice to its characters, though it still regularly succumbs to the cornier side of its mainstream appeal with too-perfect rejoinders and moments designed for the music to swell just so. There’s a strong place for that sort of filmmaking, though, particularly when imagining the kind of movie that’d entice someone browsing through the Apple TV catalog into hitting play. It’s a crowd-pleaser, and at that it does the job well, with a sharp, critical eye where needed, and enough complexity in the depiction to serve well as an introduction to an important and still underappreciated moment in American history.

More profound, though, is how Heder and her team approached the production, going beyond mere inclusion to facilitate real collaboration with disabled people. Taussig, for example, was paralyzed from the waist down by cancer at 14 months old, and uses a wheelchair. Indeed, all the disabled characters onscreen are similarly played by disabled actors, including Madeley.

Behind the camera, too, Heder filled her crew with disabled workers. Where so many films like this would opt for a few disabled hands, mostly as “consultants,” “Being Heumann” made the perspectives of disabled people central to its production. Hence the self-deprecation and good humor, but also insights into the very real challenges faced by disabled people and communities, as well as the difficulties of building coalitions among communities with often vastly different needs. A heated argument in the film between deaf activists and those in wheelchairs over their tenuous solidarity brooks no handholding for able-bodied audiences. This is intracommunity work, and its specificity — born of real experience — makes it all the more compelling and enlightening, including for those to whom this is all new.

In the absence of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Section 504 sit-ins, Heder’s film effectively grants access to the inner workings of direct action, with a strong sense for entertainment, education and inspiration.