Inside stories: "Sing Sing"

Even the title of Sing Sing represents an act of rehabilitation. In days gone by, you might reasonably have assumed a prison-set drama bearing that billing was referring solely to the grim institution James Cagney was trying to avoid in his crackerjack 1930s vehicles. In our post-Cowell, post-Glee world, however, anything labelled with such an urgent repetition of the one command surely also intends to speak to - hymn, even - our need for personal expression. We are all canaries now, especially those in cages. Greg Kwedar's film introduces us to the ever-foursquare Colman Domingo as one Divine G, serving a disputed sentence for murder in the second degree at the New York correctional facility, which presents as roughly as careworn and unloved as its residents. G has spent the bulk of his time establishing himself as the Welles or Branagh of the prison theatre society, using any lockdown to bash out plays of some description. We join him as his troupe triumph in A Midsummer Night's Dream; we then look in on the group's next project, an original time-travelling extravaganza featuring cameos from Hamlet and Egyptian mummies, rehearsals for which happen to coincide with G's latest clemency hearing. There is, we soon realise, a reason why Sing Sing is being positioned as a serious awards contender as we emerge from silly season and head up the red carpet anew: it would appear certain to garner votes just from the emphasis placed on the importance of putting on a show, and on the capacity of art to make a difference in the lives and hearts of man. Its optimism provides a rejoinder to the pessimistic final season of the generally despairing HBO series Oz, where one inmate swapped a prop knife being used in a prison production of Macbeth for an actual shank, with inevitably bloody, unhappy consequences.

That the film panders less and stirs much more than that synopsis suggests is down to how Kwedar approaches his material. Crucially, Domingo's co-stars are themselves actual and former prison residents, making Sing Sing a rehab project in itself, but also bringing new physiognomies, energies, rhythms and line readings to the screen. (The characters' auditions for the play appear to be the would-be performers' auditions for the film.) And rather than setting out a series of cliched, pre-ordained story beats, this screenplay - credited to Kwedar and Clint Bentley, drawing on John H. Richardson's non-fiction book "The Sing Sing Follies" and Brent Buell's play Breakin' the Mummy's Code - takes a note or two from 2017's powerful, Folsom-set documentary The Work. We're largely watching prisoners engaging in creative therapy sessions, finding a character's essence, and in so doing coming to transcend who they are and who they have been: the creation of a new self. Or at least that's the ennobling idea, but Sing Sing has it tested from an early stage via the character Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), a truly mean-looking rec-yard drug dealer G has approached with a feeling his rages may be performative - or could be channelled towards playing Hamlet (a nice, pointed choice). Divine Eye poses a tougher than expected challenge for G and the troupe's hardy director (Sound of Metal's great Paul Raci, still constitutionally unable to strike a false note, in a performance all the funnier for seeming to tesselate with Henry Winkler's exasperated drama coach on TV's Barry), but as in most rehabilitation attempts the hard labour is rewarded; it elevates them, and all of us looking on.

Given that its personnel includes real-life prisoners, Sing Sing can't roam too far; accordingly, we're locked down, too. One consolation is a renewed understanding of Sing Sing as a place: the perverse calm of its exteriors (quiet because isolated in an upstate nowhere); the painful narrowness of its cells; and the latter as set against the freeing, cathedral-like space of the rehearsal room, a place in which one might scream, shout, charge around and even wield weapons without being baton-charged and thrown in the hole. (Here is the opposite of solitary.) All the same, Kwedar maintains a tight, attentive dramatic focus, following the contours of the new play from first conception to opening night; there's scant sense of who these men are in with and who lords over them, none of the usual shower-block squabbles. For most of its 107 minutes, Sing Sing is men telling stories - their own, or those others have conjured up - as a means of liberating something within them, taking a weight off their minds or creating a better reality for themselves, one that ends not in punishment but applause and approbation. It is, finally, men: if you had tissues enough in the house, you could usefully put the screener on a double-bill with the new Netflix doc Daughters, which offers a feminised take on the correctional experience. But Kwedar demonstrates an acute sensitivity to how these men are seen and heard - striving, dreaming, mourning, moving - and how performance can shape a drama around and away from the predictable, can redirect stories towards touching truths. Watching Sing Sing, you find yourself responding not just to its near-documentary reality - the understanding this project was beneficial for all those who passed before the camera - but the scene-by-scene skill of its players, the way these men convince absolutely as a troupe with inner tensions and the ability to resolve them without recourse to one of Oz's shanks. This movie's concealed weapon is that it's beneficial for us, too: if it doesn't win every ensemble award going between now and next March, there really is no justice.

Sing Sing is now playing in selected cinemas.