“Rustin” is an Isolated Image of a Not-So-Progressive Icon

The by-the-numbers biopic does not support the weight of Bayard Rustin’s real history

Every year come November, an influx of biopics appear in theaters just long enough to make them eligible for an Oscar nod. Then, the distributor shuffles this award bait into a streaming service catalog to be forgotten after the trophies are handed out. Rustin is a clear example of this unfortunate trend -- cheap filmmaking that puts all of its energy into the leading performance and celebrates a forgotten hero of a well-known history. 

Rustin follows director George C. Wolfe’s 2020 critical and commercial success Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an exuberant film that was crafted as a vessel for energetic and stagey leading performances from Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. Rustin follows in these footsteps, letting star Colman Domingo take the wheel as he portrays Bayard Rustin, a gay civil rights leader instrumental in the organization of the 1963 March on Washington. 

Wolfe feels almost entirely divorced from the film, giving Domingo a wide berth to deliver a commanding performance that is not upstaged by flashy direction or writing. But while Davis and Boseman could hold their own without the support of a robust creative safety net, Domingo crumbles. With no aid from the direction or screenplay, Domingo oscillates between dull and caricaturish, grasping at the dissonant creative cues the film grants him, which are few and far between. Even with their limited screen time, the supporting performances are additionally inharmonious, with Jeffery Wright giving a towering portrayal of conservative Adam Clayton Powell and Aml Ameen giving a timid, archetypal rendition of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Because Rustin goes all in on its leading performance, there is nothing to lift up Domingo’s unfortunately incomplete portrayal. Bayard Rustin must traverse considerable obstacles to his success: internal battles of identity, homophobia and sexism within the movement, growing disillusionment with his steadfast pacifism, and an overall lack of faith in the success of the march. However, these narrative arcs are poorly incorporated, popping up in between each other without cohesiveness or narrative tension. Each of these additional challenges are meant to flesh out the conflict of Rustin’s character, but instead they only serve to distract and disunite the film. 

Watching Rustin fumble again and again as it struggles to juggle its discordant plotlines becomes increasingly frustrating in light of Bayard Rustin’s actual personal history. Rustin does not have the structural bandwidth or the courage to explore any actual politics beyond applause for the power of social organizing and melodramatic sorrow for the tragedy of bigotry. The film elides parts of Rustin’s history that are crucial in understanding his role as a political figure beyond his leadership in 1963. 

The reality of Bayard Rustin’s political history is much darker, more tragic, and is far more deserving of an expository biopic. As a youth, Rustin joined the Young Communist League, a position he later denounced and grew to lament as it was weaponized against him by his critics. His fear of being continuously associated with communism grew into a staunch opposition to much of left-wing politics, leading to him to condemn the anti-Vietnam War movement, and allowing his own self-conscious hangups to give support to American imperialism. 

Rustin’s anticommunism had more serious effects, too -- his realignment policies sought to take advantage of the disunity of Dixiecrats and liberals to transform the Democratic Party into a social-democratic force. But his fear of association with the far left led to the omission of the Vietnam War from his realignment plan, the Freedom Budget, dooming its goals of resource redistribution and poverty elimination once the war took centerstage on the political agenda. 

Despite the radical origins that Rustin depicts, the real Rustin continued to sink deeper into loyalty to the state, resulting in a tragic abandonment of the political integrity that the film is so keen on celebrating. Rustin was a socialist who faced state action brought against him due to his identity and leftism, and he drifted to loyalty to the state who wronged him in service of curbing his association to his own past. Bayard Rustin’s fascinating history is hidden in this by-the-numbers biopic which attempts to examine him solely along a single isolated axis — as a towering activist who speaks in slogans, stripped of the radical background that defined him and divorced from the systems into which he found himself eventually assimilated. 

OVERALL SCORE: 4/10

Rustin was released on November 17 and is currently streaming on Netflix.