The Ride Ahead

This first-person documentary by twenty-one-year-old Samuel Habib and his father, Dan Habib, explores what it's like to come of age as a young man with a rare disease that requires him to use a bulky motorized wheelchair to get around and a computer to communicate. With cameras affixed to his wheelchair and the digital voice conducting interviews and narrating the movie, Samuel meets with several notable personalities and activists for the disabled, including Judy Heumann, Keith Jones, Lydia X. Z. Brown, Ali Stroker, and Maysoon Zayid. The wisdom and frank advice they share with Samuel is powerful and by far the movie's strongest aspect.

The Ride Ahead does its best to tell this story from Samuel's perspective. Yet, while it certainly succeeds in being the inspirational picture, it sets out to be, too much of the movie feels like it's been shaped by the co-director dad (a noted documentarian of films about living with disabilities like Who Cares About Kelsey?, Mr. Connolly Has ALS and Intelligent Lives). It seems clear that the subject Samuel is most interested in exploring is sex. The film acknowledges this but seems to keep steering away from the topic to deliver a more universally positive and wholesome message. Considering how well the film conveys how awful it is when able-bodied people infantize disabled folks, it seems a bit disingenuous to prevent the ostensible primary filmmaker here from digging deeply into the aspect of his story that he's currently most interested in.