Music Within Parent Guide

Frustrated about not getting into his desired university program, Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston) decides to join the military for some life experience. Sadly, it’s 1968 and the experience he gets is in Vietnam. An explosion destroys most of Richard’s hearing, leaving him with tinnitus (constant ringing in his ears) and difficulty understanding speech, which all sounds distorted to him. He is sent back home, only to fight another battle, this time with the rehabilitative bureaucracy which insists that a deaf man cannot mange the challenges of college studies. Richard insists that he can lipread well enough to succeed in post-secondary education. He can and he does, graduating from university and landing a well paid job with an insurance company.

The most important parts of a university education don’t always happen in the classroom. One day in the cafeteria, Richard watches as a severely disabled man struggles to open a pop can. When he offers to help, Richard realizes that he can understand the man’s garbled speech clearly due to his own unusual hearing. Richard and Art Honeyman (Michael Sheen) become fast friends and Richard learns more about the challenges facing the disabled. Richard’s disability is invisible but Art’s most definitely is not. Passersby level harsh and demeaning slurs at Art and in one particularly appalling episode, a waitress insists that Richard and Art leave a restaurant because Art is “disgusting” and disturbing to other patrons. When the pair refuse, she calls the police who arrest the men based on the state’s so-called “Ugly Law”, which allows police officers to arrest those who were so “diseased, maimed, or deformed” that they have become an “unsightly or disgusting object.”

With the urging of his fellow veterans, Richard makes a course correction in his life, quitting his well paid job and running an employment placement bureau for veterans and the disabled out of his home before moving to a government agency to do the same thing. He eventually writes Tilting at Windmills, a training program designed to help employers hire more disabled job seekers and goes on the lecture circuit, training thousands of government and private sector employers. A popular motivational speaker, he becomes a public advocate for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has since revolutionized the world for the disabled.

Parents considering this film as a feel good bio-pic for family consumption will want to take a good look at the content issues and consider the age and maturity of their teenagers. The story is certainly inspiring, but it is told with a sardonic wit which is as irreverent as it is entertaining. The dialogue is also liberally sprinkled with profanity – over three dozen curse words in the movie – and there is more than one comment on sexual matters, some of which are crude, as well as implied sexual activity. There is also abundant socially condoned bullying, including one chilling scene where a young woman tells Art “I thought people like you died at birth.” Moments like these certainly help viewers understand Richard’s assessment that “The hardest thing about being disabled is the way other people treat us.”

Negative content aside, Music Within, tells a compelling, true story about how one person can change the world for the better. And it also succeeds in helping audiences see the world from the perspective of people with completely different life experiences. If those are messages parents want their teens to hear, then Music Within is playing their song.