‘Rustin’ review: Colman Domingo takes care of business in civil rights activist biopic on Netflix

First, there’s the equipment he brings to any assignment: that voice, primarily, so innately musical and expressive, and listenable. Even the sludgier expository passages in the Netflix feature “Rustin” prove no match for it.

Then there’s everything beyond the voice that makes Colman Domingo such a vital actor. He has technique to burn, but in Netflix’s docudrama about civil rights activist and March on Washington organizer Bayard Rustin, many key scenes are small ones, with one or two other actors. Domingo scales everything beautifully, intimately. Even when it’s monologue time, Domingo has an instinct for turning big moments into human-scaled interactions.

Black, gay and fearless, Rustin (1912-1987) put his passion for justice to work early, and often painfully. He eventually was a key architect and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, aka the occasion for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He was a close confidant of King’s, and while a political force himself, Rustin’s gains met with continual resistance from his image-conscious allies, to say nothing of his adversaries.

Director George C. Wolfe, working with a script by Julian Breece (“When They See Us”) and Dustin Lance Black (”Milk,” “Under the Banner of Heaven”), dives into the scenes of grassroots organizing, relishing the obstacles Rustin encounters and then letting him argue, cajole and push forward toward the right side of history. It’s not a long film (just over 90 minutes without the end credits), and as such it’s in a hurry, always, to get to the next thing. But with Domingo at the center, the scenes connect, and come alive.

Jeffrey Wright, like Domingo one of the best actors working, pops in for two sharp scenes as an elegantly disdainful Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, no fan of the outré troublemaker Rustin. Audra McDonald (as Ella Baker, Rustin’s cherished fellow civil rights activist) shares two brief sequences with the protagonist, and the sheer, relaxed pleasure these two take in each other’s company becomes a seminar in what first-rate performers can wrest from medium-good material.

There’s a subtheme at work in “Rustin,” a naturally occurring one, regarding the personal and the political, and how lives lived without fear of personal compromise come with tremendous pressure. Rustin’s sexual life is shown, in the film’s PG-13 way, in scenes set in a gay bar, a few dangerous years before Stonewall, with a fictional romantic interest, a married, ostensibly straight preacher in training (Johnny Ramey) whose attraction to Rustin is tearing him apart. Some of their scenes, and much of the politicking among various factions of the civil rights movement, work better than others. (Often we hear the faint clunk of speechifying as opposed to conversing.) Still, “Rustin” is worth seeing for the beacon of honesty that is Colman Domingo, in every dramatic context.

In the film version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” director Wolfe got wonderful performances out of him and Glynn Turman; in “Rustin” Turman provides real juice and power as labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, Rustin’s partner in dreaming up the particulars of the March on Washington. Like central figure Rustin, Randolph is not a name and story known to many under a certain age today. As written, “Rustin” does a pretty good job of making the (re)introductions. As acted, the movie transcends pretty-good.

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'RUSTIN'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material, some violence, sexual material, language including racial slurs, brief drug use, and smoking)

Running time: 1:46

How to watch: Netflix

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