‘Rustin’ Grabs the Spotlight in an Uplifting Civil Rights Chorus

The great unsung virtue of historical documentaries such as Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003), which premiered at Sundance 20 years ago and aired nationally on PBS,
is rescuing and preserving forgotten legacies. Rustin, the civil rights activist who masterminded the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom but was pushed to the margins because of his homosexuality, belatedly received his close-up in East Bay filmmaker Nancy Kates’ bittersweet portrait.

Biopics are most moviegoers’ preferred mode of visual history, though: epic yet intimate dramas with an emotional climax, driven by a larger-than-life performance by a charismatic star. This is not a recent development, of course — Paul Muni did successive turns as Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola and Benito Juárez in the late 1930s.

Not incidentally, biopics certify heroes. I can’t imagine that Kates, or anyone else in 2003, would have predicted that Hollywood would ever make a feature film about Bayard Rustin. (Certainly not one with a budget to cover a small fleet of 1960s NYC buses, taxis and automobiles.) So let us celebrate George C. Wolfe’s rousing Rustin (opening Nov. 3 in theaters and debuting Nov. 17 on Netflix), which positions — or should I say mainstreams — Bayard Rustin as one of the boosters who rocketed the Civil Rights Movement to national influence.

Wolfe’s pitch, presumably, invoked the 60th anniversary of the massive protest on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that is best remembered today as Martin Luther King Jr.’s coming-out party. King (Ami Ameen) has a small role in Rustin — this is the activist’s show, after all, and it wouldn’t do for him to be upstaged, even by the event’s headliner — that paradoxically comprises the film’s weaker moments.

The supporting cast is highlighted by Jeffrey Wright’s deliciously villainous rendition of the silver-tongued, self-serving congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Rustin’s prime antagonist, however, is cautious NAACP leader Roy Wilkins (a too-recognizable Chris Rock), perpetually concerned that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (via the media) will use Rustin’s gay identity to discredit the movement.

These powerful men play second fiddle to a sometimes manic, sometimes melancholy, always charming Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin. Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay gives Domingo a steady stream of galvanizing speeches and punchy one-liners that put us squarely onboard with Rustin’s hard-won wisdom and daring, seize-the-moment crusade. (The preview audience at the AMC Kabuki was moved to applause and cheers more than once.)

The film’s structure is generally inspired by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland (“let’s put on a show”), with a bigger operation and higher stakes. The movie squeezes Rustin’s life into the eight or so weeks in which he enlisted and supervised a corps of volunteers to raise funds, enroll attendees and organize the logistics from buses to bag lunches to cleanup.

Cresting on the National Mall, Rustin is a triumphant film, a vindication and validation of Rustin’s personality and strategy. In the same moment, it wants us to take inspiration from the idealism of the Civil Rights Movement that nonviolence and mass participation can transform our society for the better. That’s a big lift in the current climate, admittedly, and the movie’s final slip into sentimentality feels like an admission that escapism is the flip side of activism.

Rustin encounters devastating setbacks, of course. At the outset of the film, King’s failure to back his mentor resulted in Rustin’s ouster from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Much later, Rustin is brutally beaten by a cop for refusing to sit in the rear of a Greyhound bus. (He is en route to forgive and make up with King, who he needs to convince to join the D.C. rally he’s planning.)

His gay relationships provide comfort and pleasure, but also frustration. The movie evokes through vignettes (police raids on gay bars, the risk of public exposure) the fraught, pre-Stonewall lives of gay people, as well as the 50-something Rustin’s difficulty in integrating his personal and public lives. But Wolfe is careful — too careful, I submit — about limiting the intimacy we are allowed to witness.

Homosexuality is not the taboo in the Black community that it once was, but the film is far more comfortable talking about it than depicting it. Rustin shares one chaste kiss with his younger white lover, and has one evocative love scene with a married Black minister. Consequently, we don’t get a full measure of Rustin’s softness, vulnerability and need.

Rustin recorded a couple albums of spirituals — he had a lovely singing voice — that Kates used to fine effect on the soundtrack of Brother Outsider. Rustin, in contrast, includes a clumsy scene in which a character thrusts an instrument into the protagonist’s hands and impels him to play and sing a few bars. That moment encapsulates the limitations of biopics, which compress and shoehorn events and character development into a grand narrative tide.

The first half of the movie, in particular, skips at a dynamic clip, and it’s easy to slip into its enjoyable, entertaining flow. Colman Domingo carries it the rest of the way, give or take a superfluous, poorly conceived shot that confirms King and Rustin’s reconciliation.

But we had long been convinced of Rustin’s contribution to that day, and beyond. And we also know he will always be an outsider.

‘Rustin’ opens in select Bay Area theaters Nov. 3 and begins streaming on Netflix Nov. 17.