A little scorned, but not deterred by his forced resignation from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after outside pressure necessitated the cancellation of the planned march on the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo), if anything, became even more committed to the larger Civil Rights movement.  Rustin set his sights on organizing what would be the largest march on the US Capital, a two-day event involving 100,000 peaceful protesters in the spirit of Gandhi, demanding equal access to jobs and freedom for African American citizens.  To help lead this campaign, he assembled a team of many prominent rights leaders and political figures including A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman), Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), Dr. Anna Hedgeman (CCH Pounder), and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Aml Ameen) among others.  The August-set march was a resounding success, and when Dr. King took the stage and delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, it was to a rapturous crowd of nearly 250,000 people. 

George C. Wolfe directs Rustin, from a script by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, seeking to tell the story of the influential civil rights leader whose name is often glossed over when looking at the movement.  The 106-minute biopic premiered at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of its Netflix release making it Wolfe’s second collaboration with the streamer after Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020).  It is a snappy telling of the story, propelled into motion by Branford Marsalis’ jazzy and energetic score, and while Domingo is giving a rightfully recognized performance here, the script moves at such a clip that it feels like a race to the finish and does not allow audiences a moment to really recognize the weight of what is happening. 

Domingo excels in the fast-paced environment of the script, lending a charismatic attitude to the eccentric man and helping to shake any of the cobwebs of history loose from the film even though Tobias A. Schliessler’s palate often gives the film the sheen of memory.  The actor has many threads to weave across the various tenuous relationships with those around him.  Some of the leaders based in Southern states do not feel that Rustin, from the North, has a true idea of what segregation looks like outside of the immediate shadow of DC, while others have issues with his flagrancy either during his protests to call greater attention to the cause or his open and avowed homosexuality.  It all comes to a head late in the film after South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond labeled Rustin as a “Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual” and tried to spin a false narrative about Rusin and King being involved in a same-sex affair.  It is the strongest scene in the film for a variety of reasons.  Not only does it show some cracks in the eternally affable and resilient Rustin which allows Domingo to pepper his performance, but the filmmaking is electric as Schliessler’s camera pushes in close and every telephone in the makeshift office is screaming in alarm with someone looking for comment and confirmation on the other end. Of all the hurdles faced by the characters in the film, this is the only one where the filmmaking slows down so that we can feel the weight of the struggle and it is not immediately resolved by the turn of the scene.

That scene is relatively simple in its construction and conception, but it also stands out in Rustin as so much else in the runtime looks the same and like exactly what you would expect a Netflix library-filler biopic to look like.  Dropped as part of an impressive late-year streak of new titles for the platform, the lack of leadup press surrounding the title means that its success – specifically, Domingo’s nomination for his performance from almost all of the major award bodies including a BAFTA – seems to have caught the streamer by surprise.  To be caught off guard by it is understandable because it does very little to break out from the crowded field of biopics as it follows the typical ebbs and flows of the genre.  The quick pitter-patter of the film can sweep audiences up in the all-important opening fifteen minutes, but the film is so cursory in its distillation of facts that it can be hard to actually engage with the film because it is moving at a mile a minute so we can not find our footing until much later. 

At the core of all of these issues, though, it is the script that really holds Rustin back from being all that it could be.  First, it is stuck between whether it wants to be an introductory lesson or a supplementary exploration of the March on Washington.  What that means is that many of the characters and their contributions are glossed over; there is not enough here to really be able to inform someone unfamiliar with the story and consequently not enough there to shed any new and meaningful light on the events for people who are already well versed in this aspect of history.  Second, it falls into the all-too-easy trap of trying to emulate the quick talk of an Aaron Sorkin piece.  It works well enough in the first act when the film is in its getting the team together phase, but the uniformed meter grows tiresome as the film plays out.  Further, everyone’s dialogue is so perfectly manicured that the word choice itself becomes distracting.  Surely, those in the room know what they were doing was profound and important work, but when everyone is speaking in these pre-rehearsed soundbites engineered to hint at the gravity of what they are doing, the dialogue ceases to be inspiring and actually becomes exhausting to listen to.  

Real life is often cited to be stranger than fiction, but sometimes it is also crueler, too.  In this instance, at the conclusion of the march, the “Big Ten” were invited to meet with President Kennedy; Rustin was left on the outside looking in.  The film ends with Rusin helping to clean up flyers left on the ground as he jokes about how he would be happy to be involved with the movement even just as a trash collector.  It ties the film up in a rather neat little bow, and because it is focused on Rustin, it also serves as a visual reminder of his focus on service to the community.  As a narrative, though, audiences are left feeling a little cheated by how quickly Wolfe concludes the March. Not only is it a pivotal moment in Rustin’s own story, but in the American Story as well, yet Wolfe hurries it along, not really allowing his characters or his audience to revel in their successes. 

Rustin is a typically assembled biopic, led by Domingo and supported by an energetic ensemble, making it easy to watch with an almost bubblegum quality to it. The script, however, just does not do the film, the cast, or the story much justice. With hardly enough information to even fill out the Wikipedia page contained in its pages, it is hard to tell what exactly inspired Breece and Black to take this specific avenue into Rustin’s story. Black has a history of telling the stories of queer leaders – most notably Milk (2008) – and with Breece’s pedigree in television, the structure begins to make a little more sense, but the story as presented is too broad and too quick for the feature format. Even still, it does shed some light on an important figure and moment in history, and with the ease of access that Netflix provides, its production is a bold, colorful, and stark rebuke of a growing political regime that wants to keep that history at bay.