Over the years we’ve seen a lot of films about the Civil Rights movement in our country. Films like Selma, Till, and Mississippi Burning have reminded us what a dangerous time the 60s were for Black Americans in the United States. It’s been a few years in the making but the latest movie about the Civil Rights Movement, specifically about one of its most flamboyant advocates and leaders, Bayard Rustin, is about to come in theaters and on Netflix. This is a tour de force performance by Colman Domingo as this man who was an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr.

Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo) is a loud mouth outgoing man who has a lot of ideas for getting Black people in America to join together to fight oppression and equality. He even upsets his own people with how loudspeaker he is. He just happens to be a gay Black man and this is something that is going too far as this is an important thing Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen), has going on.  He is asked to resign from the movement.

With the Civil Rights movement having some issues. Men and women are being beaten,  hosed down and food being thrown on them in various Encounters with White people voicing their opinions of where Black people are allowed to go and what they are allowed to do, specifically in the South, Rustin decides he’s going to organize a March on Washington DC with or without the help of his former associates.  King or the NAACP and other prominent leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.  Eventually, they realized how important this March was and joined Rustin in his cause. This was quite the undertaking though.

The director George C Wolfe uses a few different narrative devices to tell this story. When he’s doing flashbacks of Rustin as a younger man, such as when he got on a bus and did not sit in the back and ended up getting beaten up, he makes them Black and white. So to differentiate the past and the present. This was effective in helping to understand this man and why he chose this path in his life. As a gay man, things were even harder for him because guys were thought of as worse than Black people were.

This film has the occasional actor who I remember from this show or that movie like CC H Pounder or Chris Rock a popular actor and SNL Alumni but this is truly the Colman Domingo Show. He brings a level of acting I haven’t seen much of this year to the role of Bayard Rustin. He has a specific accent and flair to his character. I wasn’t familiar with this man’s story before watching this film but I am well aware of him now. That’s mainly because of the transformative and transcending performance from Domingo. He is surely going to get a lot of Awards buzz for this performance.

There is a subplot in the film that takes a back seat to the main story of the March but it’s equally important to understand who this man is and why he is the way he is. I thought the way the script was written by Jilian Breece and Dustin Lance Black showed these layers in this man. There were multiple sides to him that were complications in his life but didn’t change who he was. He was always focused on the main goal of getting the March set up and organized. That was his mission in life. The movie understands that in the way it tells the man’s story.

Rustin is an important film to see regarding its subject matter and where it fits in the annals of time, but the reason to see this film is the tour de force performance from Domingo as the title character. He goes beyond anything I’ve seen him do before. His work in series like The Walking Dead and Euphoria pale in comparison to his stellar work in this film. The wait to see this film was worth it if only to see this amazing performance by this amazing actor. 

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen