Powerful prison drama Sing Sing is Oscar-tipped

“Powerful” Colman Domingo stars as a real-life inmate of New York’s infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility in a moving film about an inspirational prison theatre programme.

When non-professionals appear alongside professional actors, the seams often show, resulting in an unconvincing hybrid. Not so for Sing Sing, a fact-based drama about a programme to rehabilitate prisoners through theatre. The Oscar-nominated Colman Domingo is at the centre as the real-life Divine G, imprisoned in New York’s infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility. He is surrounded by a cast of men formerly imprisoned there, non-actors playing versions of themselves. Against all odds, this works beautifully. Sing Sing is a polished, affecting film based on harsh but hopeful realities.

The film’s perspective is a wildly different view from lurid prison dramas, or even documentaries. We are instantly put in the midst of a production of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, or RTA, an ongoing theatre programme in six New York State prisons. Divine G, the nickname for John Whitfield, is a founding member of the group and its star, as we see in the opening scene, as Domingo, in closeup and in character, recites from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Two other professionals have major roles. Paul Raci plays Brent Buell, the volunteer who visits the prison to run the program, and Sean San José is Mike Mike, Divine G’s friend and another imprisoned RTA member. But most of the characters on screen – discussing what play to put on next and doing acting exercises – went through RTA. They are the story’s true focus.

The main character among them is Clarence Maclin, known as Divine Eye. He brings superb depth and naturalism to his role as a man with a reputation for being hot-tempered who is also a sensitive Shakespeare fan who wants to join RTA. Film history is full of people who bombed at playing versions of themselves, but Maclin is the rare exception. Divine G and Divine Eye start out as wary rivals but become good friends. Maclin and Domingo are terrific collaborators, making their slow-growing bond believable. 

Domingo has been powerful recently in Rustin and The Color Purple, and he is the same here, capturing Divine G’s larger-than-life presence yet letting the rest of the cast shine too. Domingo is always central, but he makes that a reflection of the character’s importance in the group, not an actor’s star turn. His unsentimental performance makes Divine G a man full of positive ideas and energy, with some anger and ego roiling deep inside.

For its next production, RTA settles on a knowingly-ludicrous comedy cobbled together by Buell to give each of the men a role. As it was in real life, that time-travelling hodgepodge is called Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, and includes an Egyptian mummy, gladiators, Hamlet and Freddy Krueger. Fortunately, the film shows limited parts of that production. Much of the action takes place behind the scenes in the rehearsal room, with some especially poignant acting exercises. In one, Buell asks the group members to describe a perfect moment. One man says it is looking across the Hudson River from Sing Sing to a spot where he knows his mother is looking back toward him. For another it is a memory of a picnic decades before with his wife. The film has been sharply edited for maximum effect, but that doesn’t undermine the sincerity and lack of self-pity that runs through these moving, naturally expressed answers, improvised in the men’s own words.

The director, Greg Kwedar, has made a previous feature, Transpecos (2016), but is largely unknown. He has made astute choices here, although he might have done more to acknowledge the even rougher side of prison life. For the story’s first half, the situation seems almost too idealised, with RTA members the most benign, forward-looking incarcerated people you’ve ever seen. But at a crucial moment, Kwedar undercuts that too-rosy possibility when Divine G reaches a breaking point. Domingo explodes in a yelling, crying meltdown which suggests all the long-term inner pain that his character has endured through the years in prison.

Part of the story involves Divine G’s attempt to overturn his conviction on a murder charge, based on new evidence that proves his innocence. That subplot is damning to the criminal justice system, but it is also telling that it remains a subplot. The film never bludgeons viewers with a message, and in most cases we never learn why these men are in prison. The focus remains on their inner lives and hopes, and on the way theatre becomes a psychological and emotional life raft. (According to the RTA website, the reoffending rate for members of the programme is less than 3% compared to 60% nationally.)

Awards buzz for Domingo started at the South by Southwest festival in March, and has expanded to include the film itself. It is a small movie with steep odds against it, but it is also extraordinarily accomplished, and is being distributed by the awards powerhouse A24, so who knows?

The title Sing Sing has a layer of meaning beyond the name of the prison, alluding to the way art allows the characters’ minds and hopes to soar and find expression. But this eloquent film could also have been titled, after Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

★★★★☆