108 min | PG-13 | November 3, 2023 | Netflix
Bayard Rustin organizes the 1963 March on Washington in eight weeks while the movement’s own leaders try to bury him for being gay. He builds the largest protest in American history from a cramped Harlem office. The movie knows the man is more interesting than the monument.
Bayard Rustin is the architect of the March on Washington and the man history forgot on purpose. He is a Quaker, a pacifist, a former Communist, and an openly gay Black man in 1963. Every one of those facts gives the civil rights establishment a reason to push him aside. Rustin tracks the eight frantic weeks in which he assembles a quarter-million-person demonstration while the people who need him most treat him as a liability. The film is about the cost of being indispensable and disposable at the same time.
Colman Domingo plays Rustin as a man who converts exhaustion into momentum. He talks fast, sings, jokes, and keeps moving because stillness is where the doubt lives. Domingo lets the bravado crack in private moments and shows the loneliness underneath the performance. Aml Ameen plays Martin Luther King, Jr. with caution and calculation, a strategist weighing Rustin’s value against his risk. Glynn Turman plays A. Philip Randolph as the elder who shields Rustin until politics forces his hand. Chris Rock plays Roy Wilkins with a bureaucrat’s cold instinct for protecting the organization over the cause.
George C. Wolfe directs from a script by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black. Wolfe comes out of the theater and stages the logistics of the march as a kind of choreography. Phones ring, volunteers shout addresses, maps cover the walls, and the camera moves through the office like it is keeping time. The production design turns the cramped Harlem headquarters into the engine room of the movement. Wolfe shoots the planning with more energy than the speeches because the planning is where the real labor happens.
Rustin works as a portrait of a man and stumbles as a piece of structure. The screenplay rushes through the political maneuvering and leans on Domingo to carry the weight the writing does not earn. The romance subplots feel compressed and the supporting figures get sketched rather than drawn. None of that matters when Domingo is on screen, which is almost always. This is a performance in search of a film that can match it, and the performance wins.