Colman Domingo gives his all in the frustratingly uneven biopic “Rustin”, the latest project from director and five-time Tony Award winning playwright George C. Wolfe. The film is the third feature from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions and is based on the true story of Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist who was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington.

Co-written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, “Rustin” attempts to cover a lot of ground which is both admirable and its Achilles heel. Breeze and Black show that the story of Bayard Rustin is one that’s well worth telling. But it’s their rocky storytelling that left me thinking his story would have been better served as a documentary. As it is, “Rustin” is all over the place, skittishly bolting from one scene to the next, and never settling in one place long enough. It ends up shortchanging everything from the social activism to its half-baked love triangle.

Domingo is handed a role that seems custom-made for Oscar attention and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Yet great actors have a way of overcoming that and Domingo almost does. He gives a performance that’s routinely too big, but not necessarily because of anything he is doing. It’s the script that has him constantly speaking in mini-monologues and stagy soliloquies. More organic conversations are often replaced by moments that seem aimed at Oscar voters. It’s a nagging issue that’s hard to overlook.

Again “Rustin” tries to cover plenty and in fairness there is a lot to Bayard Rustin’s story. Wolfe mostly keeps things focused on the days leading up to and surrounding the historical march on Washington. We see his falling out and eventually reconciliation with Martin Luther King Jr. (wonderfully played by Aml Ameen), his constant run-ins with NAACP head Roy Wilkins (a curiously cast Chris Rock), and his targeting by Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (the always stellar Jeffrey Wright).

Wolfe puts a lot of time into Bayard’s planning of the march and his work in convincing the major civil rights leaders to get onboard. That proved easier said than done in large part because of internal disagreements. Then you had those who saw Bayard’s sexuality as a liability for their cause – a conflict that the film ham-fistedly force-feeds rather than explores.

I can’t speak to the overall accuracy of “Rustin” since he is someone I knew little about. That alone testifies to the need of a movie about his life. But unfortunately this hopscotch storytelling makes it hard to know what’s accurate and what’s not. This is especially true for characters like Wilkins and Powell who are written more as plot devices than historical figures. Just some of the problems that keep this mostly well-meaning biography from being the powerful film it could have been. “Rustin” opens in select theaters on November 3rd before streaming on Netflix November 17th.

VERDICT – 2 STARS