Rustin: Spotlighting the Dandy Hero of The Civil Rights Movement
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
There are a couple of good reasons to watch Rustin, the movie produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground film company, which will be released this Friday in theatres followed by availability on Netflix November 17.
The first one is educational. It’s a history lesson about a fascinating under-recognized civil rights figure, Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Civil Rights. Timed for the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, that event is remembered for Martin Luther King delivering his “I have a dream” speech before an estimated 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial, spurring the passage of historic equal rights legislation.
Secondly, it’s a chance to experience the warm, witty, mercurial performance by Colman Domingo in a breakout lead role. The 53-year-old actor, a veteran of Broadway and series television (Fear of the Walking Dead, Euphoria) delivers a performance which makes this modestly budgeted biographical drama pop like a Broadway musical. He looks like a shoo-in for awards season attention.
Rustin, who died in 1987 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama, was a dandyish, intellectual eccentric who refused to fit into anyone’s ideological box. Lanky and bespectacled, he has a professorial manner, with a broken tooth from a beating by the police.
Raised as a Quaker in Philadelphia, he had a passion for spirituals, Elizabethan ballads accompanied by a lute, and a fondness both for good-looking young men and political debate. As Domingo portrays him, he’s fast on his feet and never at a loss for a sharp comeback or inspirational phrase, even among the Black civil rights leadership, where oratorical elegance was practically an entrance requirement.
The script is written by Julian Breece (When They See Us) and Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for Milk) with dialogue that is literate and snappy in a manner that suggests an adapted stage play. Veteran theatre director and occasional filmmaker George C. Wolf (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) keeps the pace peppy, though visually the film lacks any distinction. Arguably, grassroots activism, in living rooms and meeting rooms, is not known to be particularly scenic.
In a prologue in 1960, Rustin and his friend, Martin Luther King — who cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference together — have a falling out. Rustin wants to lead a march of 5,000 to the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. But the civil rights leaders are not on board, with congressman Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright) scoffing that the combination of “King and his queen” is not a good look for the movement. Out of self-interest, King cancels the march. Rustin resigns, and the two friends part ways.
Exiled into the mostly white-led anti-nuke movement, Rustin is treated as irrelevant by the more militant up-and-coming civil rights leadership. Though the Supreme Court’s Brown vs The Board of Education had ruled racial segregation unconstitutional in 1954, discrimination is still widespread in the South, and Rustin has a plan to bring political pressure to the issue and bring himself back to the centre of the fight via a two-day demonstration at the nation’s capital for jobs and civil rights.
He’s backed by union organizer A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) and Mississippi activist Medgar Evers (Rashad Demond Edwards), who was assassinated two months before the Washington march. His friend Ella Baker (Audra McDonald) persuades him to “Get your friend back,” which send him down to Mississippi for a happy reunion with King and his family.
As the story progresses, famous names from the Civil Rights movement flip by like entries in a Rolodex: John Lewis (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper), Dr. Anna Hedgeman (CCH Pounder) and Coretta Scott King (Carra Patterson), and Mahalia Jackson (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).
Chris Rock, as the stuffed shirt NAACP head Roy Wilkins, stands out in the wrong way. (What is Chris Rock in grey powdered hair doing here?). As Martin Luther King, an under-energetic Aml Ameel gets the cadences and intonation right but proves that history-changing personal magnetism is hard to simulate.
Rustin’s sexual entanglements serve as a subplot and counterpoint to all those talky meetings. There’s some suspense about his relationship with a younger white assistant, Tom (Gus Halper), and a fictional lover, a married Black preacher (Johnny Ramey), an affair that could bring down both their careers.
Wolfe doesn’t attempt to recreate the magnitude of the Washington event, spending a lot of time in the tense build-up to the big gathering (will anyone show?) before cutting to archival footage, and reenactments.
It feels anticlimactic but perhaps understandable. Rustin is not about the man who had a dream in front of the roaring throngs, but the man standing behind him who gave King the stage. It’s a pleasure to get to know him.
Rustin. Directed by George C. Wolfe. Written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black. Starring Colman Domingo, Chris Rock, Glynn Turman, Aml Ameen, Gus Halper, Jeffrey Wright, Audra McDonald, CCH Pounder, Da‘Vine Joy Randolph, Maxwell Whittington-Cooper, and Carra Paterson. In select theatres November 3 and on Netflix November 17.