Sing Sing

Historically, you don’t open an awards movie until the fall and, publicly at least, you don’t even give much thought to awards season until then. But A24 has chosen to open Sing Sing in the middle of July and it’s tough to imagine us encountering a more poignant and powerful film the rest of the year, especially a year following one that grounded to a halt for nearly five months of partly overlapping Writer’s Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes.

Sing Sing tells the story of inmates incarcerated at the titular Ossining, New York correctional facility who take pride and pleasure in a Rehabilitation Through the Arts program that sees them collaborating on and performing a stage play twice a year. A founder and cornerstone of the program is John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo), a published author and playwright serving a 25-to-life sentence for a murder he claims he didn’t commit.

Divine G is surprised and skeptical when the hardened inmate and theatre newcomer Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin) auditions for the part of Hamlet, the lone dramatic role in a madcap original time travel comedy conceived by the inmates and penned by the program’s director (Sound of Metal Oscar nominee Paul Raci). Divine Eye lands the role and bristles at the generous guidance Divine G is happy to extend him.

Hamlet famously uttered “The play’s the thing” and for these open-minded Sing Sing convicts, it is the thing that’s keeping them going during the challenges of incarceration.

Sing Sing does not offer us many looks at those challenges. Our introduction to Divine Eye sees him pulling a threatening shakedown of a new inmate, an impromptu performance that seems to get him noticed for the acting program. We hear that Divine Eye also carries a blade in his waistband, although how seems a mystery given the extensive, reckless cell searches the prisoners are subjected to. The movie respects us enough to spare us the tropes of prison films and TV series. It also opts for an air of documentary-like realism, which it achieves with the help of a cast composed largely of ex-convicts credited as themselves.

That’s a bold and risky approach for writer-director Greg Kwedar and co-writer Clint Bentley, collaborating on their third feature film together. The previous two they wrote together: the Kwedar-directed Transpecos (2016) and the Bentley-directed Jockey (2021), both starring Clifton Collins Jr., barely played in theaters and failed to win them many fans. But that becomes ancient history once Sing Sing is embraced as must-see cinema, buoyed by the hip and relevant distributor A24 and the newfound star power of Colman Domingo, fresh off his Best Actor Academy Award nomination for Netflix’s Rustin.

Domingo’s breakthrough has been a long time coming and if you only know him from Rustin, you are missing out. The 54-year-old has been a working actor since the mid-1990s, initially on stage and in television. In recent years, his command of the big screen has become harder to miss with arresting turns in If Beale Street Could Talk and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Even when the films haven’t been great, like last year’s The Color Purple musical or this past winter’s Ethan Coen lesbian road comedy Drive-Away Dolls, Domingo has had scintillating screen presence.

But he’s never before gotten a film showcase quite like Sing Sing and he absolutely makes the most of it with an epic performance. We’ve all seen memorable prison movie performances before, from Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke to Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption. Where Domingo’s work here differs from those turns is that it never feels like an established actor at play. It feels like a full-embodiment of a three-dimensional human being trying his hardest to remain hopeful for his often-bleak existence to take a turn for the better. Domingo is so at ease in his craft that he makes us utterly forget that he’s a recognizable near-star of stage and screen in a cast comprised largely of unprofessionals.

The authenticity of Sing Sing makes it more akin to riveting prison documentaries than scripted fiction. It recalls Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous’ outstanding 2017 documentary The Work about a Folsom Prison therapy retreat and the heartbreaking work of Jon Alpert (HBO’s Life of Crime series) and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (HBO’s Paradise Lost trilogy). Like those, this one turns the camera to real people whose lives have been in ruins. And though that sounds like a recipe for either a clunky and amateurish drama or something exploitative, Sing Sing somehow manages to be the furthest thing in the world from either of those designations.

The gap-toothed, unpredictable Maclin is the film’s biggest discovery. An alumnus of actual Sing Sing prison rehabilitation theatre (his only prior credits are the documentaries Unlocked: The Power of the Arts in Prison and Dramatic Escape), Maclin makes such a strong impression that he’s virtually a lock to compete for Best Supporting Actor honors alongside the likes of such longtime heavyweights as Samuel L. Jackson and Stanley Tucci. Raci, a lifer with an improbable and breathtaking breakthrough for 2020’s Sound of Metal, absolutely deserves to be in the conversation again as well.

Kwedar and Bentley have the good sense to pull from real Sing Sing productions, a fact that closing videos makes clear. This film is a celebration of the arts as a form of therapy, expression, and self-discovery. Those angles will resonate with everyone who’s ever acted in anything whatsoever before. While it has its amusing incidents, they feel just as true as the heavy ones that are peppered throughout. It’s a mix of feel-bad and feel-good moments that complement one another and ultimately add up to something stirring, life-affirming, and not soon forgotten. I would be shocked if we’re not still talking about this film decades from now.