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Rustin Movie Review

Rustin is a 2023 biographical film directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Colman Domingo in the main role. It’s a forgettable, standard biopic.

Bayard Rustin, advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., dedicates his life to the quest for racial equality, human rights and worldwide democracy. However, as an openly gay black man, he is all but erased from the civil rights movement he helped build. This movie actually could have been pretty good or at least interesting. It deals with a gay black man during the civil rights movement after all, so they could have explored troubling homophobia that exists in the black community even today.

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But unfortunately they failed to portray that. In fact, this movie could have been about any other civil rights leader and it would have been almost the same. That is how much homosexuality is present in a film that is purportedly about a gay man. And those scenes that dealt with his romantic pursuits were quite unconvincing and rather inept.

Rustin is worth seeing only for the great central turn from Colman Domingo, an actor who up until this movie hadn’t quite gotten the chance to shine, but here he was excellent and very believable. He is also charismatic and his dialogue scenes were particularly effective. It’s a shame, then, that all the other characters were so uninteresting.

Rustin is a Netflix movie and it looks like it. There is not a single aspect here that elevated the movie to a more cinematic look. The cinematography is weak, the score is forgettable and the directing from George C. Wolfe is quite uninspired. The movie looks and sounds like a stage play that it should have been from the start. There are some interesting conversations within this film, but for the most part it failed to engage me.

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