Rustin (2023) & All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)

Two new movies show Black Americans in righteous protest and in sweet contemplation

Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo) before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963

Evelyn (Sheila Atim) holding the little girl Mack, Mississippi-born, -raised and -cherished

Rustin (2023)

In theaters. Begins streaming on Netflix November 17

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)

In select theaters.

These two movies transport us into the Black American experience along strikingly different paths.  They both suggest that there’s a route up from pain.  Each reminds us that no journey is untroubled, that there’s no way of being at peace that can’t also get you hurt.

Rustin is a political drama about a feverish, indeed fanatical, civil rights activist and organizer who solidified a moment in his nation’s history in spite of a society that despised who and what he was.

Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) righteously testifies here that he was born Black and homosexual on the same day. Therefore, the country would simply have to deal with all parts of him.

He was ’buked and scorned, as the old African American spiritual has it, from two directions.  Outwardly from his skin color, inwardly from the shame that made him hide his desires and who he hoped to love.

The two identities wove around each other in his mind, but he never comfortably showed the world both sides of himself.  In the title role Colman Domingo smartly chooses to keep the raging protestor – the agitator who won’t shut up – constantly in front of us.

The civil rights old guard, respectfully invoked yet slyly mocked here, never knew quite what to do with him in the national Black struggle for equality.  The legendary, seasoned labor organizer A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) had mentored and relied on him for a 1941 Washington demonstration.

Then, in 1963, in the events leading up to the historical March on Washington, we see Randolph stick by Rustin as the event’s chief organizer.

But even revolutions have an Establishment, and other civil rights leaders like Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock) and powerful Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (Jeffrey Wright) feared Rustin’s sexual orientation, if it became known, could sabotage not just the March but the entire movement.  Traditional Black Christian love extended only so far.

Crucially, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen) held ultimate sway, since everyone knew that his speech before the Lincoln Memorial on this critical day would have to capture the nation’s moral attention.

In the past, even King had been chary of associating with Rustin, a gay man, and nasty, untruthful gossip had been spread about their relationship.

But in the civil rights movement King held the moral high ground, and once he approved of Rustin to organize the March, it was all systems go.

The director George C. Wolfe, working from a screenplay by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, keeps a brisk pace, and the painstaking preparations for the March are exciting to watch.

But the movie doesn’t let us forget Rustin’s internal struggle to be who he is, a guardedly out gay man, while trying to pull off an achievement more monumental than anything he’d done before.

The storytelling strikes a thrilling balance between nostalgia – the sets and costumes are delightfully on point for the period – and moral urgency.  The glorious panorama on the Washington Mall we see in news clips today was never a sure bet.

Legendary labor organizer A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) staunchly supported Rustin

The DC cops were against the March, there was no assurance crowds would show up and ‘til the last minute no one knew there’d be enough water to cool marchers on a scorching August day.

Bayard made it all work.  The personal and the political never loosened their grip on the boundlessly passionate Rustin.  As a man seeking love he stumbled, and we see his relationships compromised by unfaithfulness and a deadening secrecy.

But his social commitment pulled him up from despair, and Domingo soars in the role by keeping Rustin’s exuberance ascendant.  This man, who lived for the movement, never stops moving, shouting, pleading, arguing, scheming.

The movie centers on a particular moment in history, yet the actor is so vivid he thrusts Rustin’s swagger and suffering fully into our own time.

The fierce urgency of now that Dr. King stressed underlies Rustin’s ordeals and drops him right in the middle of ours.  Domingo sends him racing toward us.  I thought at the movie’s rousing finale, how we need such a man today!

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt couldn’t be less insistent.  Poet/photographer/filmmaker Raven Jackson, in her feature film directing debut, working from her own screenplay, relies on us as enraptured onlookers to sift and weigh events.

She demands we take them in before we can understand their meaning or even their exact place in her sprawling, out-of-sequence narrative.

Set in a magisterial rural Mississippi, the fragmented story “begins” sometime in the 1970s.  We’ll shift back and forth across decades, so beginnings and endings aren’t easily marked off.

We’re shown details with intense closeness, but we get a grip on the aching lives at stake only deep into the telling, and even then, it’s hard to absorb all we’re witnessing.

But witness we do.  Early on we see a tall Black woman, Evelyn (Sheila Atim), holding a small child. We don’t yet know who the child is, but she’s held as though beloved, precious (two movie titles that might, unbidden, spring to mind).

The movie overflows with packed cultural images, drawn from Black life, recognizable by anyone who takes the time to absorb them.  Patience in watching this movie has delicate rewards.

I can’t recall ever seeing on screen brown skin this lustrous, braided hair this glowing, church music this serenely restorative.

You’ll need to give in to its stately cadence, because this kind of moviemaking is rarely attempted today:  reverential, subdued, unhurried.

Before we get a clear fix on the young Black girl Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) we saw held in her mother’s arms, we meet her again, now aged 10 or so, fishing, silently, as if waiting not just for a jerk on her pole but some message from the wet hanging garden of nature that surrounds her.

Mack’s father Isaiah (Chris Chalk) is teaching her not just how to fish but to happily watch and wait at the mercy of water, air and light.  “Slow.  Take your time,” he tells her.  The way they stand in awe of nature seems to make perfect sense.

We soon see Mack at play with her sister Josie (Jayah Henry), and the two girls take in the landscape’s looming trees, spooky hanging Spanish moss, serene rivulets and streams as though they’re what steadies their lives.

Mack’s sly flirtation with the gentle, nervous boy Wood (Preston McDowell), seems filled with promise, until we ease forward in time.

By then, the older Mack (Charleen McClure) clings to an older Wood (Reginald Helms Jr.) in a reunion after they’ve both moved on, Wood to another woman, Mack to a life without someone who was vital to her growing up.

Mack (Charleen McClure) will carefully learn to celebrate herself in every kind of light

Josie (Moses Ingram), now also older, helps Mack endure and bring a child into the world.  But neither woman has achieved any culminating “peace”, Mack without Wood, Josie keeping watch over Mack.

They’re forlorn yet reconciled, often smilingly borne up by surrounding nature.  Earthen roads give them countless trails to roam and cool tributaries filled with fish, swirling water, the pulse of life.

Near the end, an even older Mack (Zainab Jah) dips her hand into a stream and digs down with her fingers to lift up the silt under the water.  She rubs the dirt in her hands, watching earth and water mix.

We’d seen the young Mack make the same gesture, asking herself how the blend of earth and water could help her survive. Both substances have a way of changing without ever disappearing.

As a director, Jackson concedes nothing to nature’s mysteries either. She’s found a visual pace far more thrumming and relentless than mere “leisure”. The rhythms here put her people in touch with earthly pulses, those affirmations of life we don’t actually summon, but can pick up on when we’re lost or in pain.

Jackson’s camera won’t let us forsake easeful, contemplative gazing.  She never speeds up the action.  Laughing shared meals and a joyful rural church service hint at communal support. It takes only this or that to lift the spirit: the pebbly feel of a familiar quilt, a wailing baby getting a cool bath, a wedding song consoling as a prayer.

In rural life, touch and tenderness seem to explain nearly everything.  There are at most 20 minutes of dialogue in the 92-minute runtime.  When Mack and Wood say goodbye before he departs to a new life, they look at and embrace one another for minutes of screen time without saying a word.

The camera circles and surrounds them, slowly traveling up, down and around their bodies, heads, faces, lingering on their grasping hands, seeing the tears pool in the corners of their eyes.  Without a word spoken, their sorrow is consecrated.

The movie overflows with such packed cultural images, drawn from Black life, recognizable by anyone who takes the time to absorb them.  Patience in watching this movie has delicate rewards.

I can’t recall ever seeing on screen brown skin this lustrous, braided hair this glowing, church music this serenely restorative.  The crisp, shimmering cinematography by Jomo Fray and endlessly tranquil, never jangling editing by Lee Chatametikool keep us transfixed, wondering, but somehow never anxious.

You’ll need to give in to its stately cadences, because this kind of moviemaking is rarely attempted today:  reverential, subdued, unhurried. Water never disappears, someone says, it just takes different forms:  rain, snow, rivers.

What’s on offer here isn’t depiction or storytelling. It’s testimony.

To get such muted, cleansing urgency onto film is a spectacular achievement, and in a first-time feature nothing short of prodigal.  Jackson could be a movie master in the making.

She put me in mind of what my mother whispered to me as a child when I wriggled in my seat in church: Be still.