You need an Erin Brockovich to sock home points about toxic waste. So Music Within will hook the audience up with a supremely cool and witty real-life character, Richard Pimentel (well played by Ron Livingston), who then escorts you through his life as a disabled Vietnam veteran, motivational speaker, author and passionate activist for the disabled community.

So what should be a tough, sentimental slog whisks by in a breezy, entertaining 94 minutes like a kind of illustrated stand-up comedy routine. Of course, 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. The film opens today in 10 markets and will need strong critical support in tandem with MGM s marketing to create awareness. The film will more than likely make its mark in cable and DVD markets.

Pimentel literally has written the handbook on how to work with the disabled. He is a pioneer in the civil rights effort to integrate the disabled into normal American life, much of this because of his own personal magnetism. Livingston and director Steven Sawalich keep the character in constant motion, his dialogue sprinkled with humor and his energy contagious. The film also is surrounded by a crew of ferociously individualistic characters.

That starts with Pimentel s mom (Rebecca De Mornay), mentally unbalanced and unable to accept or love him. Only to hear him tell it, life with Mom is bitterly funny. Especially those bimonthly suicide attempts, each to celebrate the birthday of a different child she lost in miscarriages. His mother s erratic behavior and father s death produce, against all odds, a deeply ambitious man who finds his true calling in public speaking.