Music Within is a 2007 American biographical period drama film directed by Steven Sawalich and starring Ron Livingston, Melissa George, Michael Sheen, Rebecca De Mornay, and Marion Ross.

She later reclaims her son from an orphanage, but his childhood with her as a single mother is turbulent, and he is largely cared for by his maternal grandmother and Chinese-American father, Dell Fong.

Padrow harshly tells Richard that he needs to "live a full life" to gain perspective and hone his natural speaking skills.

At a roller skating rink, Richard gets into a confrontation with Nikos, the boyfriend of a fellow university student, Christine, when Richard—using his ability to read lips—observes him insulting Art from a distance.

Later, Richard sees Christine on the university campus, and responds to her rideshare advertisement for a trip to Seattle to attend a Jefferson Airplane concert.

When they protest, Richard and Art are arrested and booked on the grounds of violating an "ugly law," an ordinance targeting the poor and disabled from appearing in public spaces.

[3] Actress Melissa George was compelled to act in the film because her father, an Australian, had fought in the Vietnam War, and sustained lifelong tinnitus and partial hearing loss as a result.

[1] Writing on the difficulty of marketing the film, journalist Kirk Honeycutt noted: "the challenge faced by MGM is to persuade an audience to risk seeing a movie about events leading up to the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act.

"[7] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter noted: "Music Within will hook the audience up with a supremely cool and witty real-life character, Richard Pimentel...what should be a tough, sentimental slog whisks by in a breezy, entertaining 94 minutes like a kind of illustrated stand-up comedy routine.

"[7] Matt Seitz of The New York Times, however, called the film's direction "annoyingly unimaginative," ultimately deeming it "a bad movie with a good heart.

"[8] Reviewing the film for Slant Magazine, Nick Schager awarded it two out of four stars, noting: "Livingston, a consistently appealing presence who exudes unpretentious everyman charm, successfully sells even the corniest of scenarios—the most groan-worthy of which is a discriminatory pancake house offense that, per uplifting melodramatic requirements—is rectified 20 years later with some heartwarming syrup.

So much time is spent on obligatory scenes involving answering machines and chance encounters on the street that his work on the ADA seems to get short shrift.