For a film so firmly entrenched in the power of solidarity and togetherness, I was surprised that my favourite moment in the recently released “Sing Sing” is one defined by separation. Late in the narrative, two friends have a heart-to-heart that is a defining moment in the film’s trajectory. The conversation is warm, but underneath the warmth there’s a thrum of restlessness as the two men Divine G (Colman Domingo) and Mike Mike (Sean San José) reminisce on younger years in their lives. This conversation could be happening in a bar, or a street corner but here it’s happening in a jail cell. The two men are both imprisoned at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison.
Despite spending their days rehearsing for a performance as part of an acting troupe for imprisoned men, their nights are spent apart. It’s in that separation of the cells that the conversation unfolds. The two men share a wall, and the camera moves between their respective isolated cells, both leaning against the wall, as they speak openly and honestly to each other about the effect that their imprisonment has had on their lives. It’s one of several deft moments where director Greg Kwedar cedes a lot of trust to his audience. We know that there is something meaningful being conveyed here and in the following scene “Sing Sing” takes a sharp turn of profound emotionality.
The spatial separation in the scene is meant to offset the emotional closeness of the moment – a bond between two men cut off from the world. “Sing Sing” is about many things, and one of its sharpest angles is its observations on how these lonely men need the support of each other. It is earnest and sincere as it prioritises empathy in its assessment of a troupe of prisoners working to put on a show, an argument for the rehabilitative power of the arts that is never cloying but thoughtful throughout.
While waiting in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, Divine G devotes a large portion of his time to developing a small theatre group for the incarcerated. It’s a chance for them to live different lives, but is also something deeply personal. It’s clear from the early moments of “Sing Sing” that it is Divine G’s creative direction that has been central to the group’s success. The film structures itself around the new production for this season, an original play called “Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code”. The opening sequences establish the hum of tension typical of a jail but it’s a sharp bit of misdirection the way that “Sing Sing” sets up a potentially familiar arc only to then problematise our expectations, offering a film that gently bends away from expectations as much as it offers catharsis.
An early plot-point depends on Divine G and Mike Mike’s work to recruit new members to the troupe. They have their eyes set on one of the more troublesome inmates in the prison, Divine Eye. Divine Eye casts an intimidating shadow in the cafeteria and prison grounds, imprisoned for robbery, but he is a man with hidden depths. He quotes Shakespeare in his first meeting with Divine G and Mike Mike, the first of several moments where Kwedar weaves gentle humour into the film’s many surprises about the men it’s surveying. (Kwedar also co-wrote and co-produced the film with Clint Bentley.) In these early moments, “Sing Sing” is meeting the urgency of its prison setting with a kind of off-kilter humorous cadence that becomes a bedrock of its first-act. But this is not just a passive feel-good prison drama, nor is it an easily enjoyed film that presents imprisoned characters as paragons of virtue.
There’s something restless and urgent at play in the consistent building of context and character that will soon turn “Sing Sing” into an astonishingly clear-eyed perspective of men struggling to retain their humanity.
Little about “Sing Sing” aligns it with a typical film that can be spoiled and yet it’s one I implore audiences to seek out while knowing as little as you can. Go see the movie now, and then return to read the rest of this review because the best thing about seeing it for the first time – with no knowledge of its context – was enjoying the jolt of surprise during its end-credits when I realised just how much of the film is rooted in fact. Beyond Domingo and San José, the inmates are all played by themselves. These are formerly imprisoned men who embody versions of their younger selves including and especially Clarence Maclin as Divine G, who gives a stunning debut performance as a would-be gangster struggling to recognise his artistic talent. It’s part of the woven fabric of the film – a gentleness to its approach that in many ways subverts expectations of what a film in jail could be even when it might play into other perceptions.
The word feel-good might be used for its warmth. A film where a troupe of plucky, jailed men band together to put on a show. That is the ostensible through-line of the film which uses the show as its climax. But there’s a lot here going on; even an argument for justice reform that refuses to utter those words but is still intelligently committed to thinking through how acts of being are critical to the drama and the humanity of these men.
There’s kindness and gentleness here, even if that kindness might appear in ways that seem deliberately disinclined to examine the seedier underbelly of prison. But then, why should it? We’re not exactly starved for films showing how vicious men can be, how the racialised American prison system is especially harmful to Black men. “Sing Sing” asks us, perhaps pointedly, to imagine a sly decentering of violence while it blends fact into fiction with incredible surety and waves of empathy. That kind of gentleness might emerge as too easy for some, but I also struggle to imagine separating the depth of that meaningfulness from the film’s own formal compulsions.
The aesthetic approach to this prison world prioritises a diffident simplicity to its approach that I have been mulling on. There’s a lot of trust in its approach that Kwedar harnesses the film with and that’s largely dependent on the central performance from Colman Domingo. Domingo has been steadily working as one of the best current performers, indelible in supporting turns in “If Beale Street Could Talk” and better than the whole of some of his projects like the well-intentioned but too-generic “Rustin”. Here, he’s offered a role that asks him to use his gifts of nuance to build the interiority of a man who emerges as one of the most profound characters of the year.
It’s likely when the awards come rolling in, we will see many clips of the lone moment in “Sing Sing” where Domingo’s Divine G loses his cool – a series of moments late in the film that are among the most moving because of the tragedy that precipitates them. But to enjoy “Sing Sing” is to realise, like Kwedar, that the measure of this man – and all these men – is in their smaller moments. There are two moments in the film where a mere sigh from Domingo feels like a wealth of emotional acuity emphasising that amidst the big emotional moments in “Sing Sing”, the film is one that is concerned with these imprisoned men as human figures striving to find corporeality in a harsh world. Within its gentle hopefulness, it feels quietly revolutionary too.
Sing Sing is playing in local cinemas
