‘Being Heumann’ Review: A Takeover Story That Knows Exactly Where the Ramps Should Go

‘Being Heumann’ reaches Apple TV on November 13 after a limited theatrical run that began November 6, and it is the first feature from Siân Heder since she won the Best Picture Oscar for ‘CODA’. It opened the Toronto International Film Festival, which tells you how much weight Apple is putting behind it. The script comes from Heder and Rebekah Taussig, adapted from Judy Heumann’s 2020 memoir.

The story is set in 1977 and follows Heumann, played by Ruth Madeley, after five years of waiting for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act to be signed. The man holding the pen is Joseph Califano, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, played by Mark Ruffalo. When he keeps dodging her calls, Heumann and a coalition of fellow activists take over the federal building in San Francisco and refuse to leave.

On paper this is a ready made crowd pleaser, and for a long stretch of its 127 minutes it behaves like one. What surprised me is how much of the film’s pulse comes from one person. Madeley plays Heumann as blunt, funny, tireless and occasionally exhausting, and she never asks for your sympathy, which is exactly why you give it.

Heder also deserves credit for resisting the cradle to grave biopic trap. There are no long flashbacks to childhood and no deathbed bookends, only a few tense weeks inside one building, and we learn who Heumann is by watching what she does under pressure. The scenes where the protesters have to improvise ways to eat, sleep, communicate and stay put are easily the liveliest in the film, because the characters get to be hungry, flirtatious and cranky rather than monuments.

The trouble is that the film does not extend that same generosity to everyone. Ruffalo’s Califano is a stiff, exasperated bureaucrat with very little going on beneath the surface, and the movie leans on him as a villain a little too comfortably. The script also follows an inspirational beat sheet that you can map out in the first twenty minutes, and the payoff arrives so quickly after so much buildup that it lands softer than it should.

The supporting ensemble helps cover those gaps. Madeline Delp brings real warmth as Kitty Cone, whose gentler instincts rub against Heumann’s, while Ray Fisher, Roberta Colindrez and Andrew Pilkington give the group a lived in texture. Dylan O’Brien plays the sympathetic TV reporter, and he is perfectly fine, though his thread is the one that most often pulls focus from the person the film is named after. It matters, too, that the cast includes disabled actors, because the film feels like it comes from inside the world it depicts rather than looking in from the street.

Visually and tonally this is a safe film about people who were never safe, and I wish it had taken a few more risks with its own form. Humor is plentiful, the sexuality of its characters is treated frankly and without embarrassment, and the closing stretch makes it clear that the fight did not end with one signature. Those choices keep the movie honest even when the plotting is predictable.

I came out of ‘Being Heumann’ moved, a little frustrated by how tidy it is, and fully convinced that Madeley is a major talent. It is not the daring reinvention its subject deserves, but it is warm, funny and handsomely acted, and its heart is in exactly the right place. I give it 8 out of 10.

Do you think ‘Being Heumann’ earns its awards season push, or is it too safe for its own story, so tell me in the comments where you land?