Starring Ron Livingston and Michael Sheen. Rated PG. Opens Friday, November 9, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

The most effective scenes in Music Within –a fact-based tale of how the Americans With Disabilities Act got passed in the United States of George Bush I–depict attitudes that look incomprehensible to a modern audience.

Specifically, there's a moment when injured Vietnam veteran Richard Pimentel (played by Ron Livingston) and his closest pal, a fellow with cerebral palsy (Michael Sheen), are refused service at a Portland, Oregon, restaurant because the customers find their presence "too disturbing". That was in the mid-1980s.

Before that, we get the whole life story of Pimentel (a leader behind the congressional legislation), abandoned by a nutty mother (Rebecca De Mornay) and shunted between orphanages and relatives. Told with ironic voice-overs intended to be amusing, the preamble is dull until the shaggy-haired youth is sent to 'Nam, where literal shell shock sends him back to States with permanent hearing loss.

The obstacles encountered prompt Pimentel to fight on behalf of fellow vets and people with visible afflictions. Sheen, who played the differently crippled Tony Blair in The Queen , does what's expected to convey the inner nobility of a brilliant fellow trapped in a failing body. But it is stunt work compared with that of Yul Vazquez as a fellow activist more stunted by anger than the loss of his leg.

It may seem churlish to dismiss such a well-intended movie, but its obviousness is a kind of condescension. The film suffers from the medicinal, stiffly staged nobility of, God help us, a Ron Howard movie.

The filmmakers, including TV–like director Steven Sawalich, don't trust the audience to find their main story interesting. So they pad it with a generic love story, coupling Livingston with Australia's Melissa George as a campus cutie who loses interest in Richard as his life's work takes off. The predictable soundtrack cues, taken mostly from songs that are about five years behind what's on-screen, don't exactly lend authenticity either. If there's music here, it stays within.

Link: Music Within official site