‘Rustin’ puts a spotlight on civil rights hero

TORONTO >> Bayard Rustin, the civil rights activist and primary architect of the 1963 March on Washington, who often worked tirelessly out of the limelight, takes center stage in the new Netflix drama “Rustin.”

The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, stars Colman Domingo as Rustin, a towering figure who worked for decades alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and whose vision of the March on Washington — site of the “I Have a Dream” speech — led to one of the most indelible moments of American history.

″I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble,” Rustin once said.

“Rustin,” directed by veteran theater and film director George C. Wolfe, is the first narrative feature from Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company. Led by a powerhouse performance by Domingo that’s already being called a likely Academy Award nomination for best actor, “Rustin” aims to celebrate a pivotal but undersung civil rights hero.

“So much of what he did was compassionate and fueled by responsibility — not arrogance but responsibility,” says Wolfe. “He had a brain that was organizationally astonishing. What would make him heroic was not fueled by selfishness. And he was funny.”

Rustin, who died in 1987, was an openly gay Black man, who lived through a time when being either was enough to put him in jail. In 1953, Rustin spent 50 days in jail and was registered as a sex offender — a conviction that was posthumously pardoned in 2020 by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Wolfe, a major theater figure who directed Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and Suzan-Lori Parks″ Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/ Underdog” and created the musical “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,’” was initially drawn to Rustin as a subject after learning about him while working as creative director for the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. Wolfe, himself a Black and gay man with a laser-focus for putting together a production, identified strongly with Rustin’s sense of purpose and his refusal to be neatly defined. “My definition of myself is so much larger,” says Wolfe. “I’m not going to waste time arguing with you about what I can andcannotdobecauseI’mbusy. Clearly, you aren’t that busy becauseyou’rebusytryingtoplace me in a box. That I really get. It’s like: ‘I’m directing ‘Angels in the America’ a seven-hour play, get out of my way.’ ‘I’m doing a movie about Bayard Rustin. I gotta do my job.’ Can I get shameoutofmywaysoIcango do this? Can I get fear out of my way so I can go do this?”

Rustin, a Pennsylvaniaraised Quaker, was famously hard to pin down. The illegitimate son of an immigrant from the West Indies, he was a communist, then a socialist and pacifist who believed strongly in nonviolent protest. During World War II, he spent 28 months in prison for refusing military service. Later, he became a prominent supporter of Israel.

PARRISH LEWIS/NETFLIX VIA AP This image released by Netflix shows Jeffrey Mackenzie Jordan, left, and Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin in a scene from “Rustin.”