Being Heumann review: CODA director returns with warm but generic disability rights movie

Running time: 127 minutes.Rated R (language, some sexual material and drug use).

In theaters Nov.6.

On Apple TV Nov.13.When 2021’s “CODA” steamrolled toward the end of the award season all the way to a best picture Oscar win, the feat was surprising at the time.

But in retrospect, not so much.Audiences back then were craving movies that made them feel good instead of pretentious and depressed.And comfort is “CODA” director Sian Heder’s comfort zone.She proves as much again with “Being Heumann,” a warm if generic disability rights story that had its world premiere Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival.Based on a real 1977 protest, a group of scrappy underdog activists led by the indomitable Judy Heumann stage a 28-day sit-in — one of many across the USA — to demand the government finally enforce a 1973 law forbidding discrimination on the basis of disability. That would require the sign-off on the final regulations by the squirmy United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo, fine). The head of HEW hems and haws because giving the go-ahead means costly ramps and elevators would need to be added to inaccessible buildings.

And fast.But Heumann and Co.

are so determined to get Section 504 signed, about 150 of them storm the Federal Building in San Francisco and make camp.At one point they go on a hunger strike. That’s ripe territory for Heder’s greatest gifts: building ensembles and encouraging genuine playfulness.

They’re taken full advantage of once the righteous ragers are locked up in their raucous faux-tel.The characters have wheelchair races down the hallway and refashion a bathroom into a hair salon.

There’s a sex tent that they call… “the sex tent.” What gets in the director’s way is her tendency to fall into the beat-by-beat conventions of historical storytelling.“Heumann” feels like too many other us-against-the-man movies to the point of being...