Being Heumann: The Sit-In Is Fiercer Than Heder's Movie

Hollywood skipped a lot of Toronto. We already wrote that part. Apple still showed up with a disability-rights drama that wants to be this year’s crowd movie.

Trace Sauveur filed a C+ from the world premiere. Siân Heder, five years after CODA, has made Being Heumann. Ruth Madeley plays Judy Heumann. The bones are a 1977 occupation of a San Francisco federal office, the fight to get Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act actually signed, and a supporting list that includes Mark Ruffalo, Dylan O’Brien, Rob Delaney, and Ray Fisher. Apple will put it in theaters on November 6 and on Apple TV on November 13, per AwardsWatch. Nexus Point only prints the 13th. I am not going to referee a calendar. I will referee the reviews, which cannot agree on whether the movie has a pulse.

The occupation, as the reviews tell it

Punch Drunk Critics puts the legal hook first. Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act in 1973. A lot of them, the review says, did not know what they had signed. Section 504 was the first federal civil-rights protection for disabled people. Implementing it cost money. Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, played by Ruffalo, did not want to sign the regulations. He liked his job.

Heumann’s answer, in 1977, was to stop asking. Alise Chaffins’s TIFF note has Judy telling disabled people around the country to occupy federal buildings until Califano takes a meeting. In San Francisco she and Kitty Cone, played by Madeline Delp, stay with about 150 others. Chaffins says 25 days. AwardsWatch says 28, and calls it the longest peaceful occupation of a federal building in U.S. history. The movie is not a Wikipedia stub. If two critics cannot match the night count, the film is either sloppy or the writers are rounding. Either way, it is nearly a month of people who need attendants, catheters, and food, sitting in a building the government would like empty.

Stephen David Miller, writing for Decoding Everything, puts a reporter in the hallway. Dylan O’Brien’s Evan White thinks the pictures are “inspirational”: wheelchairs, the blind, the deaf, skipping meals. Miller’s audience in 2026 moved. He also argues that inspiration, intransitive, is cheap. The activists in the film already know access is a hassle. Hale Zukas, Andrew Pilkington, gets the line Miller quotes: disability is not a tragedy. It is a tremendous hassle. That is the useful sentence. The rest is whether Heder films the hassle or the speech.

Chaffins opens at seat height. A woman in a wheelchair rolls down the street and flips off a honking truck. That is the movie telling you Judy will not apologize for taking the lane. It is also the kind of cold open a studio biopic storyboards in the first week.

Madeley is not the argument. The script is.

Madeley has spina bifida. Heder cast disabled actors in disabled roles, which Miller and Chaffins both treat as the point, not a press note. Chaffins says the performances are strong across the board and that it is wild we still hire abled people to play these parts. Sauveur is cooler. He says Madeley has Heumann’s hellion commitment and that neither she nor the script spends much time on a private self. This is less a Judy Heumann biopic, he writes, than a historical drama about an event she happened to run.

Nexus Point goes further and calls Madeley the weak link. Confidence on the surface, not convincing, a character who is hard to like. That last complaint might be the movie working. Punch Drunk says Heder and co-writer Rebekah Taussig do not sand her down. Walls up. Called an asshole by her own people. Fighting with Cone, the quieter activist with muscular dystrophy. Before a hearing she tells people to show cleavage and cry. If you needed a saint, you walked into the wrong sit-in.

I trust the “hard to like” reports more than the standing ovation. A leader who wins a month-long occupation is not a mascot. The split is whether the film lets that roughness sit, or whether it uses it as seasoning on a crowd-pleaser. Sauveur wanted more of the temerity. For a movie about radical change, he writes, Being Heumann is tame. Nexus calls the structure predictable, the supporting cast wasted, the ending lackluster, and the whole thing a conventional follow-up to CODA. Punch Drunk’s screening exploded into cheers at every inspiring beat and the writer is already penciling People’s Choice. Nexus does not see that prize happening. Same festival. Different rooms, or different appetites.

People’s Choice at TIFF is the Oscar weather vane people still quote. Pattinson’s talk-show movie is the acting story some of us were watching instead. Being Heumann wants the other lane: the movie you clap for, then stream on a Sunday. Apple can sell both. The reviews cannot.

Ruffalo, the Panthers, and the people in the hallway

Califano is not a mustache. Chaffins says he is a man who will ignore a minority to protect a budget and a title. Miller has him treating rights as impositions. Punch Drunk has him scared of the cost and of unemployment. That is enough villain for a studio picture. It is also how this kind of delay actually looks. Nobody in the building has to hate disabled people. They have to not want to think about them. Chaffins writes that fear of becoming them does a lot of the work.

Brad Lomax is the other history the film apparently does not duck. Antwan Tolliver plays the Black Panther with MS. Punch Drunk says he uses the Party’s stature to help the occupation. Chaffins watches people who knew him before the chair try to reconcile the two versions. Disabilities can arrive mid-life. The movie, at least in her account, lets that discomfort stay in the frame.

O’Brien’s reporter starts by ignoring a nonverbal activist, then learns, then uses access without talking over the people who need it. Jon Beavers’s Jim Pechin flirts with Judy. Rob Delaney and Ray Fisher are on the Apple call sheet in Nexus’s listing; the reviews I have do not spend much time on them. That is the “wasted supporting cast” complaint in practice. A sit-in with 150 people should not feel like a lead plus two.

Punch Drunk likes the fights inside the coalition. Deaf priorities are not blind priorities are not MS priorities. That is the part a formula biopic usually flattens into a group hug before the third-act signature. If Heder kept those arguments, the movie has a spine. If they are one scene, they are a pamphlet.

What TIFF is actually buying

Miller forgives the needle drops and the speeches to awed extras because the specifics work: actors whose disabilities match the roles, a movement that is not one injury and one demand. Sauveur sees the accessible crowd-pleaser template and wants the film to steal some of Judy’s defiance instead of narrating it. Nexus wanted CODA’s heat and got a lesson plan.

Venice just handed a Lion to Woman Unknown and a lifetime prize to Burstyn. Toronto is doing the other festival job: finding the movie that plays in a mall in November. Apple timed Being Heumann for that window. Theatrical on the 6th, living-room on the 13th, if AwardsWatch’s dates hold. A 504 picture with Madeley in the chair and Ruffalo as the secretary is easy to trailer. “Longest peaceful occupation” is a logline. “She told them to show cleavage and cry” is the movie I would rather watch.

Heder is not a tourist here. CODA already put her in rooms with deaf actors and a studio that wanted a cry. Sauveur says that record positions her to tell this underdog story. Nexus uses the same record as a stick: compared with CODA, this one feels conventional. That is the trap of the follow-up. You either get credit for caring or you get blamed for repeating the caring in a neater shape. Taussig’s name on the script is the other tell. If you hired a disabled co-writer and still ended up with needle drops and awed extras, the issue is not research. It is nerve.

Apple’s November plan is the industrial version of that nerve. A theatrical week, then Apple TV, which Nexus lists as Apple TV and Punch Drunk as Apple TV+. The extra plus sign is not the story. The story is a streamer paying for a 1977 occupation and needing it to play like a prestige Sunday. Festival cheers help. A C+ from AwardsWatch does not kill a streaming launch. It does tell you the movie may work better as a clip of Madeley in the hallway than as two hours of strategy.

What I would still watch

The 504 fight is not obscure if you live with the ramps it produced. It is obscure if you think civil rights peaked in a different decade and a different skin color. Lomax is in the movie so that shortcut fails. A Black Panther with MS bringing food and stature to a mostly white disability sit-in is history, not a diversity insert. If Tolliver is as good as Punch Drunk and Chaffins say, that strand is the reason to buy a ticket even if Heder’s camera goes soft.

I would also watch for the body logistics the reviews only glance at. A month in a federal building with 150 disabled people is not a montage of signs. It is attendants, bathrooms, medication, sleep, and the police deciding whether to cut the phones. Miller calls the film an ode to hassle: living with a disability, organizing, cajoling officials. If those scenes are on screen, the speeches can be forgiven. If they are not, you have a moving poster.

Nexus never found anyone to care about. That is a real fail state for a group portrait. Sauveur found a galvanizing subject and a tame frame. Punch Drunk found a crowd that wanted to clap. Miller found friction and forgave the tropes. Chaffins found an opening shot at seat level and a reporter who had to be taught not to skip the person who does not speak. Those five accounts are enough to know the movie is not a disaster and not a lock. They are not enough to call it CODA with ramps.

I did not sit in Roy Thomson Hall. I sat with write-ups that cannot share a temperature. A film this loaded, about a sit-in that worked, will get the benefit of the cause. The cause does not need a C+. Judy Heumann already won the building. Heder has to win the two hours, and half of TIFF is not sure she did.

If you go in November, go for Madeley and for Lomax, not for the standing ovation. The ovation is what the occupation already earned in 1977. The movie still has to earn the rest.