RUSTIN (2023)

Long left off the roll call among prime Civil Rights activists, largely for being openly gay and hence not a ‘proper’ historical role model, Bayard Rustin at last gets his name checked, if not the bio-pic he rightly deserves.  Focused on the intense seven-week period in 1963 that saw him take lead position organizing the March on Washington and reestablish contact with nearly all the famous movement leaders he’d lost touch with.  (Rumors & innuendo, and his own arrogant swagger, left him on the outs even from a close, but wary friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. and on down from there.)  Now, they need him to run the show, so to speak.  Or do with the notable exception of Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, played in high style by Jeffrey Wright, the best perf in here by a city mile.  And that points up a lot of the film’s problems since nothing else develops similar dramatic urgency, and the film settles down to waxworks exhibit, offering speeches (and quotes from others’ speeches) instead of dialogue.  Worse yet are group scenes where everyone picks up cues in ping-pong fashion (WARNING! Reaction shot overload) as if director George C. Wolfe were setting the scene for a Musical Comedy ‘Numbo.’  (Just add exclamation point: RUSTIN!)  Meanwhile, the period settings, music and DL sexual self-loathing strike an early ‘60s mode while the filmmaking style for some reason leans late ‘70s-early ‘80s.  Who’dathunk that the deadening didactic spirit of Stanley Kramer*, would-be master of righteous thought-provoking banalities, showing little feel for the medium, would be resurrected by exec producers Barack & Michelle Obama!  Say it ain’t so Barack.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Four years after the March on Washington, Stanley Kramer tried being daringly up-to-date and controversial (his usual modus operandi) touching the third-rail of racial prejudice in GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER/’67.