Rustin is a dutiful history-lesson movie of the type that usually fails to stir me, yet in recent years I’ve come to put more value on such efforts. If any acknowledgment of the difficult, “inconvenient” periods of America’s past are going to be banned from libraries and schools, then let art do what it can to fill in the gaps. Rustin does so with a serviceable professionalism, dramatizing the efforts of activist Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo) to organize the 1963 Civil Rights march on Washington, D.C., a monumental effort that, as the film tells it, was nearly derailed from racist forces outside of the movement and homophobic forces within. The script, by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, toggles somewhat haphazardly between Rustin’s planning efforts and his gay identity, so that you come away feeling that neither focus gets its full due. And while Domingo (a harrowing presence in the likes of Zola and 2023’s The Color Purple) delivers enough stirring speeches to have earned an Oscar nomination, his wise words often seem to come a bit too quickly in the moment, rather than arise organically from the scene at hand. Still, director George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) guides things with a sturdy hand, ultimately providing a cinematic sketch of the astonishing logistics that went into an event that set the stage for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
(1/28/2024)
