“Being Heumann” is a moving and fascinating story of an American hero, one whose name you may not know. Judy Heumann (Ruth Madeley), who used a wheelchair since contracting polio as an infant, was an activist for disability rights who in 1977 led a 26-day sit-in at the San Francisco Federal Building. She and her fellow protesters, many of whom were also disabled, were drawing attention to the federal government’s delaying of the implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, passed in 1973, to give equal access to federally funded programs to people with disabilities. Heumann, an effortlessly charismatic and outspoken young woman, was tired of waiting for politicians to do something. “Stop feeling you deserve to be invisible,” she tells the group.

Directed and co-written (with Rebekah Taussig) by Siân Heder, whose “ CODA” was an Oscar winner in 2022, “Being Heumann” isn’t really a biopic — we don’t get much of Heumann’s life other than the events of 1977. (After a lifetime of advocacy that led to her being called “the mother of the disability rights movement,” Heumann died in 2023 at the age of 75; “Being Heumann” is also the title of her memoir.) And it’s not a perfect movie: Heder occasionally gets a bit heavy-handed in the storytelling, rather than letting us sort out the heroes and villains for ourselves.

But the film has quite a story to tell. After a brief prologue establishing that even five years earlier, Heumann wasn’t afraid to careen into city streets in her wheelchair in protest and flip the bird at bus drivers, we’re in San Francisco and the sit-in is very quickly under way. You sense, watching the group take over a floor of the building, a remarkable sense of community: of a diverse group of people of differing abilities taking care of each other, finding strength in each other. It was, we learn, the longest occupation of a federal building in history — all the more astonishing considering the challenges its participants faced.

Mark Ruffalo is effectively beleaguered as Health, Education and Welfare secretary Joseph Califano, the bureaucrat who’s been hesitating to implement the law. (In a key moment in the film, Califano defends his failure to act by asking rhetorically, “How many handicapped people do you see every day?” He’s quickly reminded that that’s the point: If they can’t leave their homes, we won’t see them.) But the rest of the cast are little-known faces — many of whom, as we see in the end credits, bear an uncanny resemblance to the people they’re playing. And Madeley, as she needs to, carries the film, giving Heumann a fierce, tireless determination; you never doubt for a second that this woman could move a mountain if she had to. “I’m not an (expletive),” she reassures someone who’s reeling a bit from the force that is Judy. “I’m just from Brooklyn.”

———

‘BEING HEUMANN’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language, some sexual material and drug use)

Running time: 2:07

How to watch: In theaters Nov. 6 and streaming on Apple TV Nov. 13

———

©2026 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.