This movie follows Judy Heumann (Ruth Madeley), a wheelchair user and lifelong disability rights organizer, through the 28 days in 1977 when she and more than a hundred activists took over the Federal Building in San Francisco and refused to leave until the government signed the enforcement regulations for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the law banning discrimination against disabled people in any federally funded building or program.
Director Siân Heder opens the film years earlier, on a rain soaked Manhattan street, with Judy wheeling herself directly into oncoming traffic because the curb in front of her has no cut and the crosswalk light won’t wait for her. A truck driver slams the brakes, nobody around her even looks up.
That’s the world the movie sets you down in before it gets anywhere near San Francisco, and it’s a smarter opening than a straightforward biopic checklist would have given you, because it tells you immediately what the fight is actually about: not abstract legislation, but whether a person can cross a street.
I’ll admit I went into this one skeptical, Heder’s last film, CODA, was a crowd pleaser that leaned hard on warmth, and I wasn’t sure that instinct would survive contact with a story this angry, it mostly does, though not without some friction. The screenplay, credited to Heder and Rebekah Taussig, spends its first act building out the coalition around Judy rather than her alone, and that’s the right call.
Kitty Cone (Madeline Delp) is the one who actually keeps the occupation functioning day to day, a former debutante turned socialist organizer whom Judy at one point calls “a socialist in pearls,” and Delp plays her with a steel that never once reads as performative toughness. Brad Lomax (Antwan Tolliver), a disabled Black Panther, brings the Panthers’ free breakfast program logistics into the building to keep everyone fed, which the film uses to quietly widen its scope beyond a single civil rights lane.
Hale Zukas (Andrew Pilkington) and Joni Breves (Roberta Colindrez) round out the inner circle, and on the outside, reporter Evan White (Dylan O’Brien) starts the film treating the sit-in as a human interest curiosity for the evening news before the building, and the people in it, change how he sees the story he’s covering.
Mark Ruffalo plays Joseph Califano, the Carter administration’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and the film’s smartest choice is refusing to make him a cartoon, he’s not cruel, he’s just a guy juggling a hundred competing political pressures who keeps finding reasons the timing isn’t right, which is a far more accurate and more infuriating villain than a shouting bigot would have been. There’s a version of this story where Califano gets a redemption arc that feels earned. Heder mostly resists that too. When he finally caves, it doesn’t feel like growth, it feels like exhaustion winning out over conviction, and that distinction matters.
Here’s where I have a real complaint, and it’s the pacing. At just over two hours, the middle stretch of the occupation drags in places the way the actual 28 days must have dragged for the people living through it, which is thematically appropriate but not always fun to sit through as an audience member. A few scenes of late night exhaustion and cabin fever inside the building could have been trimmed without losing anything.
That said, the film earns back a lot of goodwill in its back half, particularly in a sequence where wheelchair users physically guide blind demonstrators through the building’s corridors while Deaf protesters relay updates by hand signal down the hallway.
It’s the one scene in the movie that made me sit up, because it doesn’t resolve the tension between these different disability communities, it just shows them working around each other in real time, imperfectly, which is a far more honest depiction of coalition building than most political dramas bother with.
Madeley, who has spina bifida herself, plays Judy as someone you’d probably find exhausting to be around in real life, which is clearly the point. She’s funny, she’s magnetic, and she can also be genuinely unkind to the people trying to help her. When a television reporter tells her that her story is inspiring, she doesn’t smile and thank him.
She asks him flatly whether he means inspired to actually do something, or just inspired to feel good about himself for the length of a segment. It’s the sharpest line in the film, and it works precisely because Madeley delivers it like she’s tired of the question rather than like she’s landing a scripted zinger.
None of that softness gets extended to the content either, and that’s really why the R rating tracks once you’ve actually sat through the film instead of just reading a logline. Judy and her fellow occupiers are not polite. They swear at the officials stalling them, they swear at each other out of sheer exhaustion, and the script doesn’t sand any of that down to make the history more palatable.
My honest advice for parents is to watch this with, or ahead of, an older teenager rather than handing it over blind, since the language and the tone of the political confrontations are a lot rawer than the poster’s inspirational framing suggests.
Why is Being Heumann rated R?
Being Heumann is rated R by the MPAA for language, some sexual material and drug use.
Violence: A protester is shoved to the ground during an early confrontation with building security. Federal officials cut the phone lines inside the building on more than one occasion and threaten to send agents in to physically clear the occupiers out, and those standoffs are staged with real dread even though nobody ends up seriously hurt on screen. A demonstrator outside the building is shown being roughly grabbed and restrained by police during a related protest. There’s no blood and no drawn out fight choreography here. The violence in this one is almost entirely about the threat of force hanging over the building, not the depiction of it.
Sexual Content: Judy and fellow activist Jim Pechin (Jon Beavers) start sleeping together partway through the occupation, shown in a brief, mostly implied scene rather than anything graphic. The dialogue around it is blunter than the scene itself though, with the occupiers cracking jokes about sex and dating as disabled people that go further than a PG-13 script would ever allow..
Profanity: This is the rating’s biggest driver. Judy curses constantly, including multiple F-bombs inside the film’s first ten minutes, and the language only gets saltier as the occupation stretches into its third and fourth week and everyone’s patience frays.
Alcohol/Drug Use: During the exhausted, later stretch of the sit-in, protesters are shown drinking beer and smoking marijuana inside the occupied building, a detail pulled directly from firsthand accounts of the real 1977 occupation. It’s played as a coping mechanism for people running on no sleep and no answers.
Related FAQs
Is Being Heumann based on a true story?
Yes, it dramatizes the real 1977 occupation of the Federal Building in San Francisco led by Judy Heumann, and it’s adapted from her memoir of the same name.
Who plays Judy Heumann in the movie?
Ruth Madeley, a British actress who has spina bifida in real life, plays Judy Heumann. Mark Ruffalo plays Secretary Joseph Califano and Dylan O’Brien plays reporter Evan White.
Is Being Heumann appropriate for kids?
No. It’s rated R for language, some sexual material, and drug use, and it plays better for older teens and adults than for younger children.
When and where can I watch Being Heumann?
It opened the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2026. It arrives in select theaters on November 6, 2026, and starts streaming on Apple TV on November 13, 2026.
Who directed Being Heumann?
Siân Heder directed it, her first feature since her Oscar winning 2021 film CODA. She co-wrote the script with Rebekah Taussig.
What is Section 504, the law at the center of the film?
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 banned discrimination against disabled people in any program or building receiving federal funding. The 28 day sit-in dramatized in the film pushed the government to finally sign its enforcement regulations, years before the broader Americans with Disabilities Act became law.
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Reference Sources
Rebecca Hollis is the founder of Screen Parent Guide and a film content analyst with seven years of experience reviewing films for an independent ratings consultancy. A Film Studies graduate of Emerson College, she specialized in content classification and how ratings systems communicate, and often fail to communicate, what families can expect from a movie.