RUSTIN: Civil Rights Biopic Wants You To Know How Important It Is

My fiancé really likes Rustin. She grew up in Europe, where many schools only teach the broad strokes of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Compare that to American public education, where every year we talk about the movement and its major players and moments. I can see how going in cold is the best way to approach Rustin, an otherwise exhausting recap of the events leading up to the March on Washington in 1963.

Bayard Rustin was one of the key organizers of the March on Washington, working alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and iconic Black figures of the day to build a unified front when nobody else would. Rustin envisioned a hundred thousand demonstrators marching on the Capitol — he got 250,000. He was rejected, ousted, and maligned by his own comrades, who saw his communist allegiance in the 1930s and socialist membership in the 1940s as liabilities. Rustin was also gay, an open secret since the ’40s — rare for a time when queerness was criminalized, even rarer for a Black man to be so open about his queerness.

Rustin’s story adapts naturally to film, and it’s clear to see why: It’s an underdog story. It’s an underdog within an underdog story. (That’s two dogs deep, if you’re keeping track.) Rustin has to fight for responsibility, respect, power, and position within his own movement, and his movement is one of the most widespread radical sociopolitical causes in modern U.S. history.

It isn’t this icon’s story that’s the issue with Rustin. If anything, the film’s best feature is that it champions him in a way that feels long overdue. From the first moment he’s on screen, the film treats him like lightning, or like a saint — among naysayers, nonbelievers, cynics, and bureaucrats, he is a holy bolt of history. Rustin behaves from minute one as though Bayard is one of the most important historical figures to have ever been depicted on film. And yet the movie on the whole is dreadful, creaky, and somnambulant. The radicalism is missing from this portrait of a radical man.

Colman Domingo Plays Bayard Rustin

Colman Domingo’s Oscar-nominated performance as Bayard Rustin is odd to say the least, combining the anarchic energy of a coked-up fox with the nerdy horniness of Steve Urkel. The babyish, nasal voice. The snorting laughter. The blend of ego and sass. The hunched granddad posture. The flamingo-like strutting and boasting and incessant wit. Domingo forgoes his usual statuesque blend of menace, humor, and authority to play Bayard as a catty, uncool man about town. His Rustin sucks all the air out of a room, makes everything about him, and has a wandering eye for beautiful young men. Despite being portrayed as a horny nerd, Rustin is also depicted as an incredibly attractive man who’s also in love with beauty, so much so that he always has lovers clinging to him, hanging on his every word — like Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, or like James Bond. The performance is as bold and flamboyant as it is exhausting — Rustin is in every scene of the picture, and he’s always in the same key.

Domingo’s work here is comparable to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s in Capote. I can see why he got an Oscar nomination. Both men are great actors who, in these roles, have been boxed into cartoons. Hoffman inhabits Truman Capote with more grace and humility and, ultimately, accuracy, than Domingo does Rustin: There are a hundred interviews on talk shows you can watch that support Hoffman’s creative choices and help you appreciate the delicate way the actor uses Capote’s public-facing quirks and persona to work backward and develop his internal life. The performance feels showy because Capote is a showy character, but in classic biopic fashion, the performance brings you into Capote’s world and asks you to imagine the cultural icon’s private life, his anxieties and sadness. The stuff they don’t show you on television.

Compare that to Domingo, who’s just sashaying scene to scene selling this broad characterization like a boardwalk huckster. Domingo is an actor of great intelligence and dignity, but his peacocking as Rustin is a miscalculation, a Hail Mary to inject verve, joviality, and wit into a character and story that don’t need it. This is not a performance. It’s a pitfall, a corner Domingo feels backed into. You can’t imagine Rustin in anyone else’s story because Rustin makes him the center of the universe. And by that design, Domingo‘s Rustin feels lifeless. The role feels like an internment.

As an impression of a man, it’s distracting. I have no idea whether Rustin actually talked like Steve Urkel or not. But I can watch old videos of him speaking, or listen to a debate between him and Malcolm X, and the voice is not nearly as pronounced as what Domingo is going for. The missing teeth on the right side of Rustin’s mouth made his speech higher-pitched and gave him a lisp, I suppose, but the character we see on screen in Rustin is otherwise an acting exercise for Domingo.

This Is A Really Bad Play

Ten minutes into Rustin, I was reminded of another Netflix original drama, again about a historical Black figure: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The stuffy ambience, the horse-blinder fixation on the central performance, the wooden blocking, and the golden lighting reminded me of that movie’s unventilated style, and I was surprised to learn that they’re both made by the same filmmaker, George C. Wolfe. As much as I dislike Wolfe’s work, at least he’s got a recognizable style.

Wolfe is a theater director and playwright by trade. On Broadway, he directed the first run of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America as well as Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk and the Broadway debut of The Normal Heart. He’s won Drama Desk Awards and Tonys and has left an indelible mark on American theater. And yet he’s also been directing for film and television since 1993 and hasn’t seemed to figure out how to stage a dialogue scene or compose a compelling shot. He directs both Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Rustin like they’re recordings of plays, with little obvious thought given to staging and composition beyond that which a theater director is preoccupied with — his direction seems to boil down to making sure actors are visible and audible rather than elements of a formal diegesis.

Rustin is plagued by the most basic cinematography imaginable. Cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler previously worked with Wolfe on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Schliessler’s camerawork in Rustin, just as in Ma Rainey, is unmotivated and brusque, and he often goes for a dramatic dolly or dolly-zoom into a character like this is The Wolf of Wall Street or In the Heights, like the movie is scared to admit that it’s a historically focused biopic that’s 99% dialogue. Schliessler’s insistence on style only betrays that the film has none of its own. Take a flashback to the Montgomery Bus Boycott for instance — Rustin boards a bus until police force him out, kick him to the curb, and beat him, and the brief scene is presented in black and white to signpost that this is taking place before the events of the film. The aesthetic, though, is a crisp black-and-white filter, like it was done in post and the color editor just turned up the contrast a bit to emphasize the filter. It’s lazy, a creative afterthought, covering for a cinematographer and director who didn’t otherwise know how to communicate a flashback scene to the audience.

Even the conversations are shot in bizarre ways. One quiet scene between Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen) and Rustin, for example, has wild lighting design. King has a soft key light and some fill to even out his face, and Rustin has a harsh key light coming from a completely different angle that follows him no matter where he sits in his chair. Unmotivated light is pouring in from every angle in nearly every dialogue scene. I guess we should at least be glad that Schliessler knows how to light Black actors, a skill most white cinematographers working in Hollywood still can’t be bothered to learn.

“I’m The Trash Man” —Danny DeVito, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia

Breece and Black‘s script is dreadful, and every line is a mangled scrap pile of clunky exposition and 50-cent words. “Such a vocation holds great rewards both worldly and celestial,” Rustin once says about a job with the church. Every line of dialogue Domingo gets is similarly loaded with nonsensical observations and poor structure, and half of them sound like they’re written to one day be embroidered on cheap throw pillows. In another scene, Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock) challenges a colleague, saying, “Perhaps you have facts to substantiate your claims?” It’s a mind-numbingly convoluted way to say something incredibly basic, it’s doubly bad with Rock’s delivery — he says it like it’s his first take and he had to be fed the line via an earpiece — and it’s triply bad when Rustin repeats the line later, verbatim, mockingly, to another character.

It’s not just a few lines, though — this movie has an endless arsenal of clunkers. One of the final lines comes after the March on Washington, when Rustin goes about picking up trash left behind by the protesters. “No man is less valuable because he picks up trash to care for his own,” he says. Rustin speaks like he spends his spare time lurking on BrainyQuote dot com. Every scene has a line that you can tell the screenwriters thought was so poetic, so epic and extraordinary, that the whole movie grinds to a halt every minute so the dialogue can simmer. It’s as though they thought the secret to immortalizing Bayard Rustin is by making him into a superhero philosopher.

Lest we forget that this movie is about history, everybody speaks in Wikipedia pages, with little humanity or connection to the material. The big stinker in the screenplay is a confrontation between Rustin and one of his bosses, who brings up Rustin’s parents and also force-feeds us a crash-course armchair psychology lesson. “You must stay here where I can protect you,” he says. “From the world, and from yourself. You are a man of exceptional skills and of 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? Not as a man and not as a person committed to saving the world.” Barf. Yuck. Get that shit out of here. This isn’t even a case of “show, don’t tell” — it’s a case of “if you don’t have anything good to write, don’t write anything at all.” This is, also, the only time Rustin’s parents are invoked in the film.

The decision to tell the entire story from Rustin’s perspective also undermines the drama. It requires that key moments, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s meeting with the president, be relayed through uninteresting monologues as other characters tell Rustin about them. There are so many scenes where a newspaper, radio, or TV broadcast tells us something really important has just happened in the Civil Rights Movement, and the film always lets those exposition dumps play for just long enough for the info to sink in before Rustin steps in to keep the story going. This dude loves dramatically turning off historically significant broadcasts. This movie has taught me that it was Bayard Rustin’s favorite thing to do. 

The Depiction Of Queerness In Rustin

This biopic interprets its subject in two ways: by focusing on Rustin’s identity as a Black man and as a gay man, both against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. Rustin lays it out himself to someone in the film: “On the day I was born Black, I was also born a homosexual,” he says. Those sexual and racial identities are important to understanding who Bayard Rustin was as a historical figure, but since Rustin is a character drama, it has to drill into something, and so the screenwriters chose that identity and drilled away.

Screenwriters Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black together have a good history of telling Black and LGBTQ+ stories in Hollywood, so it makes sense to bring them together to tell the story of a gay Black activist in the Civil Rights Movement. The result, though, is a film that never recognizes Rustin beyond those descriptors. He’s gay, he’s Black, and he’s socialist. Here’s the scene that’s about his queerness. Here’s a scene about his Blackness. Here’s a scene about… well, actually, none of the movie, really, articulates his socialist ideas. It’s a disservice to an underappreciated icon of the Civil Rights Movement to reduce him to his most broad characteristics.

The film feels distinctly modern in its approach to Rustin’s story. The reduction of Bayard Rustin to a celebration of the individuals facets of his identity and the assertion of that selfhood channel 21st-century ideals about sexual freedom and sexual identity. This is six years before Stonewall, after all, and the most famous openly gay Black American celebrities up to this point were writers and artists during the Harlem Renaissance rather than political figures, so that Rustin showed up to public events with his boyfriends is a pretty huge deal. Unfortunately, the movie normalizes his queerness to the extent that it ceases to be political within the events of the film — because of the sociopolitical landscape of America in the 1960s and because of Rustin’s race and line of work, Rustin’s queerness was radical in a hundred different ways, whether he wanted it to be or not, but Wolfe and his screenwriters treat it with the same sanctimony that they would if they were making a film about any other gay historical figure. They put Rustin’s sexuality into a little glass jar and stick it on the mantle, shine some spotlights on it, and pretend like it can exist on its own.

So many scenes in Rustin exist to tell us the bare essentials of his sexuality. In one scene, we see that he leers after men; in another, he tries to seduce a former flame; in another, he flirts with a new activist. Yet the film’s treatment of his sexuality beyond those signposts is conservative and old-fashioned. Take the film’s (lack of) sex scenes, for instance. For a man who’s so often characterized as “what if Steve Urkel approached his sexual prey like a panther,” Rustin doesn’t even get to fuck in his own movie.

Wolfe has a talent for choosing subjects with interesting, libidinous sexual lives — Rustin and Ma Rainey — and then hanging them out to dry. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is full of characters flirting, kissing, and sizing one another up, and it makes a point to show how leering Viola Davis’ Ma Rainey can be, just as Rustin does for Domingo’s character, but at the end of the day, all we get in Ma Rainey is some tasteful, fully-clothed sex. In Rustin, things are comparatively more risqué — Rustin’s sole sex scene in the film is a shirtless one, but it’s framed from the shoulders up, with dark shadows around him and his lover, and we only see hugging and kissing. I’m not saying that I want every movie that depicts gay sex to be Brokeback Mountain or All of Us Strangers, but if the movie feels too uncomfortable to show me its gay protagonist having passionate sex with a consenting adult, then what’s even the point of constructing a character around his sexual identity and sexual appetite?

The production as a whole is distinctly built on a foundation of 2020s neoliberalism. Produced by the Obamas’ company and using the biography of a champion of civil rights to tell a story about intersectionality within 20th-century activism, Rustin already situates itself as catnip for a specific demographic: white liberals who maybe know broad strokes of the Civil Rights Movement, who can maybe identify half a dozen important names of the era, and who will be satisfied with the film’s big swings at bolstering and worshipping the load-bearing columns of Rustin’s identity, even while the film doesn’t jeopardize that sturdy neoliberal foundation by asserting much of anything about the politics of the time or the meaning behind Rustin’s queerness and his Blackness.

Conclusion: Rustin

As a film, Rustin is wooden and stodgy. As a celebration of Bayard Rustin’s life and work, it’s a little more sound, but only a little. It’s funny that Netflix put out a documentary about Rustin’s life at the same time this movie came out, as though the historicity of Rustin is so faulty that you need a supplemental text just to get anything useful out of it. But Domingo’s performance is grandiose and the character depicted as a brilliant man among fools, so I guess that’s all you really need to write with lightning these days.

The lasting bad taste that Rustin left in my mouth is best exemplified by its “Own your power” tagline. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it bears the same cadence as lots of other Gen Z-isms, but it also became famous after it appeared on the cover of O magazine. Oprah Winfrey literally owns the trademark on it. In the end, the best review Rustin deserves is that its tagline, and by extension, one of the film’s more important lines, is something you’d see on a mug or photo frame you can get for five bucks in the discount aisle in Target. It’s a derivative, hollow, three-word intellectual property presuming to be both a rallying cry and a sales point. “Own your power”… for one Netflix subscription, at just $15.49 a month.

Rustin is currently streaming on Netflix.