Rustin (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Page Laws

Produced by Bruce Cohen, Tonia Davis, and George C. Wolfe; directed by George C. Wolfe; screenplay by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black based on a story by Julian Breece; cinematography by Tobias Schliessler; edited by Andrew Mondschein; production design by Mark Ricker; costume design by Toni-Leslie James; art direction by Travis Kerr; music by Branford Marsalis; starring Colman Domingo, Aml Ameen, Glynn Turman, and Chris Rock. Color, 106 min. A Netflix release. 

Forced, as they are, to derive and deliver an entire life from a few selected incidents, the makers of biopics invariably raise historians’ and critics’ hackles for their manifold sins of omission. Given that George C. Wolfe’s Rustin presents us with a slew of Civil Rights leaders to follow, the screenwriters and Wolfe have wisely chosen to focus on the volatile but vital friendship between Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo) and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Aml Ameen), along with Rustin’s enmity with two others: Roy Wilkins (a badly cast, smirking Chris Rock) and Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright, underused, with his character shown as contemptible from Rustin’s dominating point of view). Though he was organizer of the epoch-marking 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Rustin’s homosexuality has put him at the end of the line of Civil Rights heroes to be celebrated on screen, as others also have noted. But here Wolfe, Black and gay himself, deftly unites his own career-long passion for social and racial justice and gay equality with that of his subject. 

Given his résumé as a Tony Award-winning playwright (The Colored Museum, 1986), theater director/producer (Angels in America: Perestroika, 1993, among many others), and Artistic Director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater for a decade, it’s not too radical a move to praise George C. Wolfe as among the most theatrically savvy directors now working in film. Having directed the Oscar-nominated adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) (see my review in Cineaste Vol. XLVI, No. 2, Spring 2021), Wolfe recruited two of Ma’s musicians to star as friends and allies in Rustin: Glynn Turman, as A. Philip Randolph, and Domingo, a supernova performer as Rustin himself. The list of Wolfe’s assembled theater and television royalty continues with Audra McDonald, as Rustin’s dear friend Ella Baker, and CCH Pounder, as Dr. Anna Hedgeman, a woman with gumption enough to finally and firmly speak up for her underappreciated female colleagues who did much of the “grunt work” for the Movement with little or no recognition. Despite their friendship in the film, Rustin sometimes avoids Baker because she knows him and his foibles all too well. It’s she who calls him a “shark trapped in a damn shot glass.” It is also she who advises him to make peace with MLK after their first serious spat. 

Early in the film, Rustin has offered his resignation to Martin, assuming that King will reject it. Unexpectedly, however, Martin accepts the proffered letter, thereby pushing Rustin away and into a job for which he’s much less suited, given that he’s working for mostly white bosses attempting to foster world peace and spiritual progress under the leadership of labor and Civil Rights advocate A. J. Muste (Bill Irwin).

One highly theatrical moment is centered on Domingo’s nervous, quick expression of despair, as his Rustin sits at a new, unwanted desk job shortly after being booted out of his partnership with King. The camera catches his anguish, but then turns quickly away from him, as if embarrassed, thus powerfully capturing his pain. With Baker’s encouragement (“Go and get your friend back”), Rustin eventually reconciles with King, using his warm bond with Coretta and the young King children to win Martin back for the crucial push to DC.

Another especially telling moment—once the painstakingly detailed planning for the march has been accomplished—is a shot of several busses as passengers embark during the early dawn hours on the day of the march. The wonder of the moment is that the camera casually pans up to the faintly lit sky—the empty sky is all we see, with Branford Marsalis’s very spare but rich brass-laden score adding emotional texture and resonance. Then, just as casually, the camera pans back down from the sky to reveal the long hoped-for, planned-for, fought-for goal: the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC—the ultimate destination of the over 2,220 busses and forty “freedom trains” involved in the march.  

The attendees slowly gather. But will there be a sufficient number of participants in order for Rustin’s grand design to work? At first this is uncertain, but—no spoiler here—history tells us that 250,000 showed up.

Just as Wolfe debunks heroes such as Adam Clayton Powell and Roy Wilkins, he elevates the young John Lewis (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper) and short-lived Medgar Evers (Rashad Demond Edwards), the latter felled by an assassin shortly before the march. Whittington-Cooper gives a particularly moving reading aloud of the simple pledge card that marchers were given to carry.

Wolfe’s brief treatment of the march itself may surprise. (MLK’s actual “I Have a Dream” speech lasted sixteen-plus-minutes but here is quoted for just a few of its concluding lines.) Wolfe and the screenwriters, it could be argued, shortchanged the grandeur of the event by focusing almost exclusively on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and those closest to that point. It’s spectacle-by-suggestion, very much a necessary stage trick when it works. We likewise leave the march, after the moment of ecstasy has passed, watching Bayard Rustin rather sadly sweeping up the trash. 

The “Big Ten” Civil Rights leaders had all been invited to the White House, with Rustin, once again, excluded. But his characteristic mixture of exalted rage and regret in the film continues to ring true and appealing. We’re informed by final screen titles that Rustin outlived his friend MLK and finally found permanent love with a white male partner to whom President Obama presented Rustin’s posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

As the film’s executive producer, Obama’s on-screen assertion that “The March on Washington never would have happened without him” acknowledges Rustin’s contributions, which the JFK White House had overlooked. In his criticism of the film, The Nation’s Adolph Reed, Jr. states that the film “falsely attributes” to Rustin “the principal responsibility for proposing and executing the march, which actually originated with A. Philip Randolph and was largely organized by his Negro American Labor Council.” Making common cause with New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, Reed skewers Rustin for neglecting, among other things, its hero’s altruistic socialist-democratic agenda of full employment and his important post March-on-Washington essays. Reed further snipes at Wolfe for “malicious presentism” in the choices he makes concerning aspects of Rustin’s personal life, including his homosexuality. 

“Presentist” it is. Biopics are invariably somewhat “presentist” or would never get funded to begin with. But “malicious”? (Recall that Ma Rainey was a lesbian in addition to being “Mother of the Blues,” a fact that Wolfe’s adaptation makes more explicit than does the Wilson play.) This I consider benign (as opposed to “malicious”) presentism.

Bayard Rustin’s missing front right-side teeth—lost in a savage beating administered by bus workers for his having sat in the white section of a bus in the Forties—almost deserve their own billing, right up there with Domingo playing the hole/whole truth of this ruminative man. (In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wolfe likewise has Viola Davis flash her title character’s significant set of teeth—in her case, lots of them gold.) 

Domingo sports his (prosthetic) dental gap with the pride of a wounded war veteran, which his character was, of course, having battled his entire life for civil rights and, more covertly, for his gay identity. Rustin was, by most accounts, a passionate, gifted organizational genius. As rendered by Domingo, Rustin is monomaniacal in his quest for justice, but likewise feral in his fear that his imprudent homosexual escapades might ruin it all—a “presentist” element, but nonetheless an historically valid one, to be sure. 

Because Rustin’s own point of view dominates the film, two paramours who figure prominently keep him and the audience constantly on edge: Gus Halper as his white assistant Tom and Johnny Ramey as Black, married minister Elias Taylor, whose infidelities are known to his wife (Adrienne Warren). (The scene in which Wolfe intercuts the minister shouting out an ecstatic church sermon with a coital scene he shares with Rustin struck me as a rare lapse in taste on Wolfe’s part.)

Another “presentist,” if also historically valid, moment occurs when Glynn Turman as Randolph is defending Rustin from the predation of Jeffrey Wright’s Powell who is, in effect, joining forces with the likes of Strom Thurmond to call out Rustin as both a communist and a pervert. “We have moved on,” Randolph thunders at Powell, incredibly shutting him up.

Wolfe’s whole purpose is revealed in the leisurely panning shot of the departing/arriving busses. Rustin’s life’s purpose, likewise, (if one accepts the film’s premise) is theatrically, cinematically, and reflexively represented in that shot. He had to get his people from here to there. He’s the one who directly or indirectly persuaded (and choreographed the movement of) a quarter of a million people to travel on all of those busses and trains, arrive at the Lincoln Memorial, and make Black America “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” The Civil Rights Act was passed nine months later. Though the Act had many fathers and mothers, Bayard Rustin, as here depicted, was surely among its chief inseminators. Surely and usefully Rustin does remind us that the Civil Rights Movement was never a monolithic undertaking.

Page Laws is professor of English and dean emerita of the Robert C. Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University in Virginia.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 2