George C. Wolfe’s miraculous new film “Rustin” is many things. It’s a biographical film about Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), an unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement and a key architect of the 1963 March on Washington. It’s also a buddy movie with Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen). And it’s a process movie about exactly what it takes to launch an event of the march’s scale, complexity and importance.
What makes the movie even more impressive is that it does it all while peeling back the layers of who Rustin was, as a key Civil Rights figure that few know about in the same breath as, say, King, Medgar Evers (who is referenced in the film) or Malcolm X (who is not).