A thoughtful US prison story that swerves felon-style yard fights for rehearsal-room revelations, Greg Kwedar’s powerful reality-based drama explores the redemptive power of community drama in the otherwise brutal life of Sing Sing maximum-security jail.
Colman Domingo’s John, the talented theater-group top dog, finds himself challenged by smart, volatile newbie Eye (Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin), whose explosive rage (and the knife in his waistband) threatens to get them shut down. A film that concentrates on the prisoner, not their crime, Sing Sing’s grainy, up-close 16mm camerawork gives the central pair’s friction-filled relationship a keen intimacy.
Maclin (an ex-prisoner in real life, like most of the cast) is astonishingly good as a Hamlet-playing tough who discovers that his gangster life is just another role that trapped him. He goes toe-to-toe with Domingo in their fractious scenes with the intensity of a seasoned pro, as their fortunes see-saw through a tough season.
Domingo, alternately mellow and quietly despairing as a lifer prepping intensely for his last-chance clemency hearing alongside the group’s ambitious show, is as good as ever. Leisurely pacing and a restrained style gives Kwedar room to dig into how staging theater productions brings hope and playfulness to inmates who’ve been battered by predatory prison life.
Touching rather than touchy-feely, it’s a high-stakes story with its fair share of fights, deaths and the jail-or-joy tensions of parole hearings. If it’s also a tad starry-eyed about drama as a cultural cure-all, Kwedar’s empathy for the life-battered inmates makes this a rare, graceful work.
Sing Sing is out now in US theaters and is released in UK cinemas on August 30.
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