Telluride Film Festival: Colman Domingo lands major Best Actor buzz for ‘Rustin’

Christopher Rosen
·3 min read
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At the Telluride Film Festival this weekend in Colorado, certain films and performances kept coming up in conversations: “Poor Things” and Emma Stone, “All of Us Strangers” and Andrew Scott, “Anatomy of a Fall” and Sandra Huller, and Colman Domingo. The Emmy Award-winning actor has consistently won raves thus far for his performance in the Netflix drama “Rustin” and has planted a flag in this year’s awards race as a formidable Best Actor contender.

Directed by George C. Wolfe (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) and co-written by “Milk” Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black and Julian Breece, “Rustin” is about civil rights hero Bayard Rustin, a close friend to Martin Luther King Jr. and the architect of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As Wolfe said before a screening of “Rustin” on Sunday afternoon, Rustin, who was also openly gay, was a major figure in the battle for civil rights but his irreplaceable contributions were largely unknown by the general public for years. That has changed over the last decade, in part thanks to former President Barack Obama, who posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. (Obama alongside his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama, executive produced “Rustin” through their Higher Ground production company. The former president introduced “Rustin” at Telluride via a taped message that was recorded before the actors’ strike.)

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But “Rustin” isn’t necessarily a biopic, even if the script fills in enough blanks about Rustin’s personal life, including his romantic relationships. Instead, “Rustin” focuses on the period between 1960 and 1963, after Rustin was forced to resign from the civil rights movement. In exile, he’s drafted back into service to help organize the March on Washington – a feat he manages to pull off with aplomb in barely two months.

“He was this big thinker and an incredible organizer, and he was influential to not only Dr. King, but all these other young people as well,” Domingo previously said to Vanity Fair. “We owe a lot to Bayard Rustin. I think it’s part of my mission to make sure that hopefully, come this fall, there will never be that question again, who Bayard Rustin was.”

For folks on the ground at Telluride, it was mission accomplished. “Domingo is unsurprisingly wonderful as a man who fights to lift people up no matter how often he gets beaten down in return,” Indiewire critic David Ehrlich wrote in his review. 

Writing for Variety, critic Peter Debruge called “Rustin” a career-defining moment for Domingo.

Domingo is in an already packed Best Actor race that includes Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”), Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Paul Giamatti (“The Holdovers”), Barry Keoghan (“Saltburn”), and Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”).

Netflix will debut “Rustin” in theaters on November 3 before it arrives on the streaming platform starting on November 17.

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