Directed by: George C. Wolfe
Distributed by: Netflix
Written by Anna Harrison
35/100
Bayard Rustin was a great many things. He was a devoted Quaker and a gay man, he was an avowed socialist yet received praise from Ronald Reagan, he was one of the leaders of the March on Washington but the NAACP tried to sweep his contributions under the rug—the list goes on, full of tangled contradictions and intrigue. His legacy, which has been overshadowed by other (straight) civil rights leaders, undoubtedly deserves the spotlight.
What it does not deserve, however, is a film as boring as George C. Wolfe’s “Rustin.”
This is not to say that “Rustin” is a terrible movie. It has a fun jazz score and Colman Domingo proves reliable as ever as the titular man, but it is a terribly conventional biopic about a terribly unconventional man, and thus fails to do him any sort of justice. Dustin Lance Black and Julian Breece’s screenplay never rises above ham-fistedness, and treats figures like Ella Baker (Audra McDonald, horrifically underused), Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen), and John Lewis (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper) as place settings rather than living, breathing people. It’s rather like watching a Marvel movie when Captain America or Iron Man shows up for a cameo: they exist only as a wink and a nod, as a reminder that “it’s all connected.” They are the balloon animals a clown makes at a child’s birthday party, making you “ooh” and “aah” before your mind wanders off to find something not full of hot air.
But what can you expect from a movie with a line such as, “You are a man of exceptional skills and keen intellect, but until you admit your anger at being abandoned by your parents, which is why you became homosexual, to hurt them and yourself, you will never be fully whole, do you hear me?” This, by the way, gets uttered by A. J. Muste (Bill Irwin), a prominent pacifist and, by all accounts, a mentor to Bayard Rustin and not a raging homophobe who likes to psychoanalyze his employees for no reason except to fill in audiences on Rustin’s tragic backstory. Truly earth-shattering stuff.
For all Domingo’s talent, even he can’t rise above a script that uses Rustin as merely a prop or a rather interesting museum exhibit. He’s gay! He has an affair with a younger white man and a married black minister! He… has no discernable personality other than “determined” and “headstrong-in-a-funny-way” (also gay)! What makes him tick? What were his likes, dislikes? Was he a real person or was he just the guy who organized the March on Washington whose life sounds like it would make a great Oscar-bait movie? It seems no mistake that “Rustin” was produced by Higher Ground, the Obamas’ production company, for in many ways it feels emblematic of Obama’s time in office: skate over the thornier things as much as possible—the communism and socialism, the predilection for younger men, et cetera—in favor of an inoffensive, self-congratulatory picture that will ruffle as few feathers as possible, never mind that its subject ruffled quite a lot. Both Domingo and Rustin deserve a hell of a lot better.
“Rustin” Trailer
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