Rustin (2023)

PG-13 for language, violence and sexuality.  While nothing is overt sexually, there are fleeting images --brief flashes --of sexual activity.  The real issue is the violence that Rustin was subjected to.  Most of the really traumatic imagery happens in black-and-white.  If the movie flashes to his past, there's probably going to be something traumatic in those moments.  The other language is tied more to racial slurs, but it isn't limited to that either.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  George C. Wolfe

I teach John Lewis's graphic novel trilogy March to my American Literature class.  In fact, we're starting Book One today.  I always start this unit by asking for the names of the heavy hitters of the Civil Rights Movement.  Without fail, I always get "Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks."  I then ask for students to confirm the following.  "You probably know a decent amount about king.  You know Rosa Parks's one big story, and you probably know next to nothing about Malcolm X."  Sorry for the script about how I teach, but I have to explain that my next question is incredibly telling.  "Does anyone know John Lewis?"  

Sometimes I have people say that they've heard the name, but that's becoming more and more rare now that Lewis has passed.  But the point of the question is to remind people that the Civil Rights Movement, like many of the great moments in history, was due to the sacrifice and commitment of a wealth of people, many of whom have started to be forgotten by history.  It's funny, because I also have the students do mini-reseach projects about the people discussed in March.  One of those names is Bayard Rustin.  I'm going to tell you --as much as I tend to dislike biopics about celebrities --I tend to really like biopics about Civil Rights leaders.  There is this weird result that has happened when it comes to movies about the Civil Rights Movement.  There are a lot of them out there and most of them are of pretty good quality.  I have to prep you.  I'm about to say the most insipid thing in the world, but I ask that you stick with me.  The sheer wealth of good Civil Rights movies have almost created a Civil Rights movie shared cinematic universe.

When we finish March Book Three, we then watch Selma. In Selma, the story focuses on King and Coretta as they prep for the march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  In that movie, John Lewis weaves in and out of King's story.  Lewis was a major player at Selma, but wasn't necessarily part of King's inner circle.  The same thing happens in March.  It's the story of Selma from Lewis's perspective.  The cool thing about Rustin is that it does the same thing.  The second March book is about the Freedom Rides.  Lewis is in Rustin.  King is in Rustin.  God, I love this so much.  It's the same story from different perspectives. We kind of view history from this snapshot perspective. But these stories, when they focus on different perspectives on the same events, we see that these are symphonies where everyone is doing exactly what needs to be done to change history for the better.  Also, Civil Rights history is one of my buttons so another movie about the Civil Rights Movement is going to make me happy.

But this is a movie that has only been nominated for Best Actor and no other category.  There's kind of a reason for that.  Colman Domingo is a fantastic actor.  He's possibly the thing that's holding Fear the Walking Dead together.  Listen, I like the show and Morgan definitely fixed a lot of issues with that show.  But Colman Domingo is hired to act as a lynchpin for a piece.  Golly, this movie probably would not work if Colman Domingo wasn't really putting everything into every scene.  It's, by no means, a bad movie.  It's just a lot of talking and a lot of reminders of what was going on in the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, it's based on reality. Again, as a guy who has a better-than-normal knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement, I still can't tell you, beat-for-beat, how things went down.  But ultimately, this is a movie about organizing a March.  As inspiring as it all is, it is about paperwork and politics. Politics is fun.  This is a different kind of politics.  It's a bunch of squabbling and self-serving behavior.  That brings drama, but it is also incredibly frustating to watch.

If anything, that brings the movie verisimilitude.  Rustin begins the story with the epiphany that there needs to be an insanely large March on Washington.  (See, there's your snapshot of history.)  He sees the footage that we've seen of the police spraying down children because they're Black with hoses and knows that he needs to pick up the baton again because White America isn't going to do anything about it.  Fundamentally, this should be a movie without a conflict.  A March on Washington is legal.  Bayard Rustin is the grandfather of nonviolence.  He wants to do everything by the book.  He has the intellectual knowhow to put this on, coupled with the passion to keep it going at a fast pace.  Technically, there shouldn't be a story here.  But for anyone who has ever tried to get things done in a way that requires people to help him, there's going to be frustrations. Technically, watching Rustin should be a nightmare or bureaucracy.  It should be a burden to watch.  I'm not saying that the movie doesn't face the burdens of its content.  There are moments where I'm just begging for people to get out of each other's ways.  But that's where the story lies.

It's odd who are the antagonists in this movie.  As a dirty liberal myself, I'm prepped for the Bingo card of Civil Rights movie villains.  I expected the cops and White senators to be the bad guys of the movie.  They're there.  We hear radio and news reports about Strom Thurmond, a man who was a senator in my conscious memory before he passed.  We have a handful of cops probably acting as the hidden arm of J. Edgar Hoover.  But mostly, the antagonists in this movie come from inside the NAACP.  It is important to note that Rustin doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater with the NAACP.  It views the NAACP as the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement.   Instead, it focuses on big personalities. It is about people wanting to be the face of someone else's work.  That's the weird insidious thing about the whole story.  Again, I'm responding to the film.  I don't know what was actually said behind closed doors.  I'm writing about the things that Jeffrey Wright said as Adam Clayton Powell. 

I mean, Adam Clayton Powell does not come across very well in this.  He's the guy who is actively fighting against Rustin and stymies him every time he gets the chance.  Is he homophobic?  Absolutely.  Every word out of his mouth reeks of disdain towards gay people and what he would consider sexual deviance.  It's probably why he is so laser-focused on Bayard Rustin.  It's that.  But as his character progresses through the story, the Jeffrey Wright version of Powell seems to be the guy who likes his face seen at these things.  If something wasn't done by him, he would rather see it not exist rather than do good without him.  

Bayard Rustin's story might be a little nerfed here, though.  Again, as much as I claim to know, I learn all of this through the lens of storytellers.  The movie starts off with the betrayal of King to Rustin.  Rustin was this heavy hitter in the Civil Rights Movement.  Through his own words, he was the man who stressed nonviolence when no one else was doing the same.  But the movie starts off with a montage of King and Rustin falling out.  King, who was becoming the face of a movement, distanced himself from Rustin due to his homosexuality and his criminal record that stemmed from being gay.  Rustin found himself trying to fight the good fight, but from a position of being broken from that emotional divorce.  Rustin opens up to King and the rest of the movie is about rebuilding that bromance.  I don't know if that's how it went down.  I hope it is.  God, I hope it is.  King was an imperfect person.  Everyone is, but as time goes on, we discover things that are disheartening about the man.  But King's reputation when it came to seeing people as people first still has yet to be broken.  I'm possibly worried that the story was presented the way it was to preserve King's legacy.

Can I be honest?  I have no idea what it means to be a gay man.  I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a gay man during this era.  But I get frustrated with Elias Taylor.  I'm watching this from my very comfortable White suburban home as I curl up with my wife, problem free.  But Taylor's involvement with Rustin is so frustrating, from both perspectives.  Rustin acknowledges that he needs to keep this movement controversy free. He knows that it took a lot to get people to put trust in him. Basically, he's not allowed to have a relationship for eight weeks.  That's on him.  That's the pledge he made.  But Elias Taylor knows this, speaks out against Bayard Rustin when asked by Roy Wilkins, and still shoehorns himself into Rustin's life.  I'm not saying that Rustin is free of encouraging this.  He seems to be the one leading the dance in a lot of these situations.  But man alive, the way that whole story ends up.  Part of it comes from the fact that we should have sympathy.  This is a doomed relationship from moment one.  People are weak and not everything was born to thrive.  I just can't deny that the whole thing is frustrating.  Again, for all we know, these are two very different points in history or maybe that didn't even happen.  Still...

The big takeaway is that Rustin hits the right buttons, but that's because we're speaking the same language.  As a movie, it's not the best.  Regardless, Colman Domingo absolutely deserves the nomination.  He makes a movie that is fundamentally frustrating into something engaging.