The images are served up by filmmaker George C. Wolfe as prologue to a biopic about Bayard Rustin, the civil rights activist and largely invisible strategist behind the 1963 March on Washington, whose identity as a gay man often prevented him from stepping forward in a larger public role. As Rustin, Colman Domingo is a commanding presence. (The actor shone in Wolfe’s 2020 “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” in the supporting role of Cutler, a musician whose self-effacing service to the greater good of the band, at the expense of his own glory, presages the dynamics of “Rustin.”) But the story he inhabits here, as co-written by Dustin Lance Black (“Under the Banner of Heaven”) and Julian Breece (“When They See Us”) and as produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s company Higher Ground, too often reduces the narrative to something that feels more educational than inspirational.

With a perfunctory plot that sometimes feels as montage-y and as superficial as the film’s opening reenactments, “Rustin” ultimately lands at the nexus of didacticism, melodrama and hagiography, when it should be stirring, unsentimental and stark. This is a story worth hearing about an admirable, complex man, but the telling is dismayingly inert.

Much of “Rustin” charts the homophobia that hampered Rustin’s career, including how he was dismissed as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “queen,” in the snarky put-down of another activist. The film also explores Rustin’s romantic relationships, including an on-again, off-again affair with a fictional married Black preacher (Johnny Ramey) and another entanglement with his fellow activist Tom Kahn (Gus Halper).

But the bulk of the story charts how he advocated for and ultimately was instrumental in organizing the gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, even if homophobia often necessitated that his work be undertaken behind the scenes. Encounters in which he is confronted by a phalanx of Washington police brass are staged on the memorial’s steps, not because the meetings actually took place there, but because the site is more photogenic than a back office. It all feels kind of stagy.

The supporting cast is filled with big and small names: Chris Rock as the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, who pushed back against Rustin’s plans; Jeffrey Wright as Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; CCH Pounder as civil rights leader Anna Hedgeman; and Aml Ameen as King, whose “I Have a Dream” speech before hundreds of thousands ultimately put pressure on the White House to advance civil rights legislation. None of them stands out as a three-dimensional character; all, rather, come across as mouthpieces, whose purpose is to articulate one of various (often opposing) viewpoints.

It’s a shame. “Rustin” is a slick, handsome, authoritative, even at times surprising production. What it does well is to introduce a new generation to the story of how a march helped propel a movement forward. And yet, at the same time, “Rustin” somehow misses the man whose name is on the marquee. The movie never exactly loses sight of Bayard Rustin, but neither does it ever let us get inside his heart.

PG-13. At area theaters; available Nov. 17 on Netflix. Contains mature thematic material, some violence, sexual material, coarse language including racial slurs, brief drug use and smoking. 108 minutes.