Rustin

Joe A2.5

Colman Domingo quietly proving to the world he’s the best in the business right now, even if it’s in a poorly made Netflix biopic.

David Sims2.0

frustratingly stodgy and cheap-looking

davidehrlich2.5

For the most part, George C. Wolfe’s “Rustin” is every bit as broad and garish as you might expect from an awards-baiting Netflix biopic. The fact that this movie about a grievously unsung hero of America’s civil rights movement comes from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions may only add to the impression of a movie that thinks of itself as a means to an end (even if Higher Ground has maintained a rather impeccable track record thus far). But it’s also hard to get too bent out of shape about it when those ends include “winning Colman Domingo an Oscar, shining a light on the semi-forgotten gay Black man who organized the March on Washington, and telling that fascist potato fuck Ron DeSantis to choke to death on the racist school curriculums that threaten to erase Bayard Rustin’s accomplishments from the history books altogether.” Be that as it may, you can’t begrudge a film critic for getting their hackles up at the sight of a star-studded prestige picture that so frequently adopts an agenda first, art where there’s room for it approach to America’s past — not when the movies have proven time and again that great art galvanizes the collective unconscious more effectively than middlebrow agitprop ever could. We can appreciate the righteous good of putting something like “Rustin” into the world at the same time as we lament how sorely the film lacks its namesake’s inspirational flair for defying convention. What saves “Rustin” from your — or at least my — most cynical expectations of it is that it strives to capture his essence in other ways. Clumsy as it can be, Dustin Lance Black and Justin Breece’s mile-a-minute script reflects the upbeat (and sometimes very sassy) enthusiasm of Rustin’s electric mind, while Branford Marsalis’ jazz score maintains the buoyancy of a man who refused to be kept down, and Tobias Schliessler’s drab-as-hell digital cinematography, um… never lets you lose sight of the ugliness that Rustin is hoping to remove from American life. In the deliberate hands of a veteran Broadway director like Wolfe, these various attributes occasionally conspire to create something that doesn’t feel like a biopic at all so much as a toe-tapping movie about putting on a show — in this case, that show just happens to be one of the largest and most impactful political rallies in human history. ~this review continues on IndieWire~