When it comes to bio-pics 60s heroes, Rustin beats Like a Complete Unknown. Though both flicks suffer from their dependence on simulations of performances that have already been filmed. Rustin builds toward The March on Washington where actors ventriloquize Mahalia Jackson’s gospel and King’s dream. Like a Complete Unknown heads toward a nada take on Dylan at Newport ‘65. (You can hear the real electric thing and even watch Bloomfield wailing with Dylan ((“Let’s Go!…All right!”)) as a Chicago blues all-star rhythm section drives them hard here.)[1] Timothy Chalamée has been praised for learning how to play Dylan’s songs, but he can’t put them across. None of his performances touch the indelible scene in Inside Lewelyn Davis where a folkie (Oscar Isaac) takes his best shot and fails to move an Albert Grossman type: “I don’t see a lot of money here.”
Somebody apparently saw money in Chalamée’s mug, but I can’t imagine wanting to hear him sing any of the songs in Like a Complete Unknown again. The plot is less than fresh too. Not all the season-in-a-scene compactions are dim but I missed any turns that caught speed-of-sound cultural changes in the 60s. I’m glad the scriptwriters hint Dylan was a rock ‘n’ roller before he was a folkie and that his amping up was a roots move. But Dylan’s wowed-if-conflicted response to Beatlemania doesn’t make the cut (and I’m still waiting for a movie about the British invasion that had Dylan in a hot rush to learn the chords to the Stones’ “Tell Me” back-stage at Newport in 1964).[2[ Instead, we get irreal figures like a genteel black beauty who drops in from out of blue to profess love for the empty vessel-person after he’s broken with women-of-folk. Somone who bears no relation to any one of Dylan’s actual intimates. (If the old master insisted on rejiggering the story of his starting out in the 60s to include a black love-interest, someone should’ve come up with a scene that evoked his ties to SNCC’s Dorie Ladner or his early 60s’ marriage proposal to Mavis Staples.)
I’m more familiar with the legends of Natural-Bob-in-New-York-Town than with Bayard Rustin’s epic trip from the Village to the edge of the Oval Office. That may be one reason why I got more from Rustin than Like a Complete Unknown. The movie was produced by the Obamas and (as one might expect) it feels dutiful—less a result of some creator’s personal impulse, than of a sense of obligation. Yet, in the case of Bayard Rustin, Obama and all of us in the party of hope really do owe the man behind The March on Washington.[3] We can start to pay him back by not relying on divine mechanisms to preserve his exemplary meld of God-is-in-the-details precision with vision. Rustin’s centering of its hero’s mad brave choice to live an out gay life in the 50s and 60s makes the content of the movie daring though the gay director, George C. Wolfe, doesn’t linger over lineaments of Rustin’s desires. Wolfe’s choice not to Taxi zum Klo may be strategic. Let’s pray it means Rustin will get shown to black Christian conclaves who shall overcome homophobia even as they take in vital history. Rustin offers unillusioned portraits of black leaders such as Roy Wilkins and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The movie’s angle on Martin Luther King Jr. makes his connection with Rustin seem deep in part because MLK once broke it off, due to the rumor-mongering about Rustin’s homosexuality.
Back in the 80s, Bob Moses cited Rustin, along with Ella Baker, as he mused on tensions between organizers and leaders/orators in the Civil Rights Movement…
I think of Ella Baker. She was a great organizer and she was a leader too. But one of the characteristics of the organizer is that their work emerges and they subside. I mean, if you think of the wave and ocean, at a certain point they subside back into the ocean and what you see is what they organized or their work. SNCC is the work of Ella Baker. But it was SNCC that emerged and not Ella. The March on Washington was the work of Bayard Rustin, but it was Martin Luther King that emerged, not Bayard. And the point is that Bayard never organized the march so that he should himself personally emerge; it was organized in a setting where someone like King could emerge. And Bayard knew that. And he set out to do just that. And that’s the mark of an organizer.[4[
Rustin’s ender underscores the under-the-emergent essence of organizing. In the aftermath of the March, Rustin (Colman Domingo) hangs with volunteers who are cleaning up the ellipse. One of Rustin’s bête noires, Roy Wilkins, announces that heads of major Negro organizations have been invited to meet JFK. The over-hearty Wilkins is probably hoping—along with the rest of the respectables—that an out gay man won’t join their victory party with the President, though Wilkins, gesturing to the post-March pick-up crew, concedes Rustin is “far more valuable to us than a trash collector.” A line that sets up Rustin’s comeback: “Roy, for shame! Ma Rustin taught me no man is less valuable because he picks up trash to care for his own.” A bit stiff? Sure, but you won’t forget the hero’s walk away from grandees, back to the greensward where he asks for a trash bag and gets on with the reparative work.
I suspect that scene could live in the black America’s collective imagination with Future’s and Drake’s “Life is Good” (2020), which has over two billion views on YouTube. This rap vid starts with a street scene of the two stars “working on the weekend, like usual.” (“They not like us”? Not!) They’re rolling on the back of a garbage truck. Not too far from Claudine’s hood? To evoke the 70s movie in which James Earl Jones “plays a working class man who is so confident that he can pull a fine-ass woman like Diahann Carroll from the back of a garbage truck.”[5[
Jones’ role as Roop in Claudine came up when Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Mike Leigh exchanged recommendations in a recent Criterion Closet meet-up. They’re together (again) because they’ve collaborated for the first time since Secrets and Lies mainlined Leigh’s movies in the 90s. Jean-Baptiste is featured in Leigh’s Hard Truths—a movie that builds to a scene that’s something close to the antithesis of Rustin’s closer. In this sequence, the actor who’s plays Jean-Baptiste’s husband, Curtley (David Webber), commits one of the most irreparable acts in the history of cinema. Leigh doesn’t do stagey sado-Tarrantino turns. Nobody gets hit or cut in this scene. But, long after the movie’s done, you’ll keep thinking about the emotionally violent act directed at Jean-Baptiste’s character. She plays “Pansy”—pense-moi? Think of me?—a desperately unhappy, tragic-comic harpy. This un-nurturing mother and lousy sister is beyond difficult to love. But her wonderfully cheery younger sister, Chantelle (Michelle Austin), keeps trying, without ever seeming beamish. In the run-up to Hard Truth’s harder-than-the-rest scene, Pansy’s damaged son has managed (somehow) to bring himself to get his mom (who assumes “everyone hates her”) a Mother’s Day bouquet. Pansy is allergic to flowers (!) but she blossoms when she finds the bouquet in her sterile kitchen. Her son loves her!? Husband Curtley (David Webber) promptly kills that vibe dead. When Pansy leaves the room, having prepped a springy vase, he takes the flowers and pitches them into the back yard. He gets his own painful comeuppance in the film’s next scenes when he hurts his back on the job. Curtly’s inexpressive, but Webber makes you feel his injury/agony. And, yet, given what he’d done yesterday…
Leigh isn’t in a sentimental mood. Hard Truths forces you to judge a husband’s willfully evil choice to subvert a mother-and-son’s reconciliation. It won’t let you (or Curtley) off the hook. The man has definitely been put-upon. And, God knows, like everyone, he has his reasons but there are human acts that are truly unforgiveable.
If only they were done only by easily identifiable enemies of the people.
Hard Truths was made before Trump’s comeback, but Leigh’s political antennae are always up. Back in 2007, the heroine of his Happy Go Lucky (played by the irrepressible Sally Hawkins) universalized Obama’s “yes we can,” even as the film featured a twisted Brit (Eddie Marsan) who embodied 21 C. fascism on the come. Post-Trump (and post-hope-and-change), Hard Truths faces up to our moment when “the people” have proven themselves capable of committing breaches that might be beyond repair.[6]
No doubt the producers who backed Rustin were alive to the state of democracy in our time. It was apt for the Obamas to greenlight the making of a film about the Civil Rights Movement’s great petitionary march in the wake of 1/6’s assault on the Capitol. I’ll allow I wish Rustin’s intertext-epilogue noted white America’s heaviest first response to the “I Have a Dream” speech was an act of terror—the Birmingham Church bombing. American history, per James Baldwin, “is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it…”
Bayard Rustin and the Obamas and Baldwin himself wouldn’t end on a “terrible” note. So, let’s close with news of local people that confirms the ongoing possibility of under-the-radar reparative acts. Last Friday, C. Liegh McInnis (who talked up Claudine in First before Jean-Baptiste steered Mike Leigh to James Earl Jones’s working-class hero) posted a report by his wife, Monica McInnis, detailing how she spent days last month serving as a point of contact for Red Cross outreach to rural areas in Mississippi after tornadoes hit the state. Monica M. works as a program manager and community organizer for One Voice where (per her proud spouse) she specializes in
voter education, voter registration, Census information, and political mapmaking. More specifically, she collects and analyzes Census data to create voting districts. Through her work, she has created at least four new districts that enable Afro-Mississippians to elect the candidate of their choice. However, along with this work, she also serves as One Voice’s liaison to the Red Cross to help them locate and aid Afro-Mississippi communities impacted by natural disasters.
You can read Ms. McInnis’s account here of her encounters with helpful church congregations, kids on bikes requesting clothes and cleaning products, farmers plugging holes in roofs without tarps etc. It occurred to me McInnis is one of Bayard Rustin’s down-home heirs, though Afro-Southerners have their own Mississippi traditions of uplift. FWIW, this northern man was struck by the following photo of a black volunteer taking notes as she talks with two needy white country people.
It’s from a gallery of workaday photos. McInnis doesn’t make too much of it. She was in-county, after all, to help Afro-Mississippians. Still, her record speaks. If America survives tornado Trump, perhaps the photo above will be a harbinger of a better future.
Notes
1 There’s footage of the Newport ’65 show in Scorsese’s documentary, No Direction Home.
2 Sorry, I can’t find my copy of the CD!
I’m reminded that twenty years down the line Keith Richards (and Ron Wood) would work out an arrangement of “Blowing in the Wind” with Dylan in a rehearsal (bootlegged here: https://youtu.be/49Ou24hZWbg?si=jkh8TUb0Ek8e7xbY&t=175) for their Live Aid performance—a mess that wasn’t worthy of their charming practice session.
3 Not more than we owe, say, Willie B. Wazir Peacock, but no-one could go too far from what’s best in this country if they stuck close to Bayard Rustin.
4. CNN interview, quoted in The White Peril: A Family Memoir by Omo Moses, p.229.
5 See C. Liegh McInnes obituary for James Earl Jones: https://www.firstofthemonth.org/rip-the-voice-and-the-vibe-james-earl-jones-frankie-beverly/
6 The people will abide. Along with the Dude and Mr. Moonlight, i.e. Barry Jenkins, who’s in my mind now since he conducted a q&a with Hard Truths’ principals that you can watch below. I wondered about Jenkins’ sense of humanity when he bowed to Leigh for making a “black-ass film.” Leigh responded mildly that “people are people,” but he allowed that he’d wanted to make a movie with Jean-Baptiste focused on a black family. It’s true, too, the relationship between Hard Truth’s sisters fulfills what was promised in scenes in Secrets and Lies where the duo of Jean-Baptiste and Austin played witty black besties exchanging secrets and truths. (Paging film historians: had black women’s elective affinities ever been put on the screen before Jean-Baptiste and Jenkins did their soulful thing in the 90s?) Jenkins, to be real, had a half-assed point about Hard Truth’s blackness. But he was just warming up. He offered a steaming “interpretation” of Curtley’s brutal throwaway, proposing it was an “act of love” since Pansy didn’t like flowers. (This guy directs actors!?) Leigh, who has never suffered twits gladly, hunkered down. Jean-Baptiste tried to be kind to Jenkins (“You’re a lovely man.”) after the presider doubled-down on his “read.” But Jean-Baptiste’s and Austin’s shared first response did justice to Jenkins…