Crip Camp, Netflix review: revolution, sex and the fight for disabled rights

Dirs: James LeBrecht, Nicole Newnham. 12A cert, 106 mins

Crip Camp is the kind of documentary whose name circulates in must-watch lists for months: it’s an inspiring true story, accessibly told.

There’s nothing more jarring or discomfiting in this Sundance Audience Award-winner than its title, which deploys an offensive American slang term (“crip”, derived from cripple) with reappropriative gusto. The actual camp in question is Camp Jened, a summer retreat in upstate New York for teenagers with disabilities, which became something of an informal, hormone-addled crucible for the American disabled rights movement.

The film was directed by James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham and executive-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, whose previous Netflix project, American Factory, won the Best Documentary Oscar earlier this year. This is a more methodical offering, and lacks American Factory’s subtle but gripping air of surreality. But there is something unmistakably Obama-esque in its portrayal of politics as something inseparable from the fabric of ordinary American life.

It opens with a patchwork of reminiscences from former campers – one of whom is LeBrecht – who all attended Jened at some point in the 1970s. Each one fondly recalls the pleasure and importance of being able to chat, sing, smoke and flirt with their peers, while some well-sifted archive footage shows them doing just that. Jened was an oasis of ordinary existence for teens who were otherwise living on the sidelines: one contributor, the writer Denise Sherer Jacobson, talks about feeling “homesick” for the place, rather than merely missing it.

Often it’s the run-of-the-mill nature of these memories that make them so bracing in context. When was the last time you saw a disabled person on screen talking openly and joyfully about their first (or indeed any) sexual experience? Humour is also a recurring feature, and it tends to get blacker as the subjects under discussion grow more uncomfortable. Neil Jacobson, who has cerebral palsy, describes an unspoken hierarchy of disabilities at the time, before chucklingly recalling the moment he told his parents about a new girlfriend who also had CP (it was Denise). They responded, he explains, by asking why he couldn’t have met a nice young woman with polio.

Crip Camp’s canvas broadens in its more conventional second half, which follows the battle for disabled rights in the United States in the 1970s, with an emphasis on its connections to the broader civil rights movement. The most prominent figure on screen in this section is the teacher turned campaigner Judy Heumann, whose own summers at Camp Jened segued into an adult life of advocacy and activism.

Much of this revolves around an extended battle to pass an item of legislation that would guarantee certain rights to disabled American citizens, which culminates in a 25-day sit-in protest at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in San Francisco. Some of the contemporary news reports are toe-curling: one describes the protestors as an “occupation army of cripples”.

But other frontline political movements are quick to provide assistance: the Black Panthers handle the catering, while the radical lesbians bring in a job lot of shampoo and wash hair for the cause. In short, the struggle is shared. The revolutionary nature of the protests isn’t mirrored by the filmmaking, which follows the prestige documentary rulebook to the letter. But the storytelling is fluid, and its underlying themes conscientiously unpacked.

Collective action itself is shown to be both politics and therapy: the doing matters as much as the getting done, and reshapes its participants’ lives for the better just as much as it does the nation at large. The film concludes with a moving sequence in which some of the campers head back to Jened – or at least where Jened used to be, since the site was forced to close in the late 1970s due to a lack of funds. Yet as they reminisce, it doesn’t seem to matter. The place played its part when it counted, and so did they.

Crip Camp is streaming on Netflix now