Sing Sing

 

Indie writer / director Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing stars powerhouse player Colman Domingo (Rustin) as wrongfully imprisoned "Divine G," the co-founder and creative soul behind a unique program in the eponymous maximum-security prison that gets inmates on the stage and in touch with their humanity and worth -- some for the first time.

When we meet G, he and the dozen or so other men in the program, called Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), are planning their next production, having successfully staged A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hard new arrival named "Divine Eye" (Clarence Maclin, who like most of the film's cast are alums of RTA) presents a challenge to G, G's close friend Mike Mike (Domingo's longtime collaborator Sean San José) and the rest of the group because of his wary combativeness and reluctance to "trust the process." G accepts the challenge, however.

The company's director, Brent Buell (Paul Raci), writes a sprawling, genre-crossing play that incorporates the cast members' wide-ranging tastes and re-energizes the group, the members of which are waging individual battles with confinement. Meanwhile, G is working on a clemency hearing, hoping new evidence he's uncovered will prove his innocence and lead to his release.

Kwedar's film weaves together the preparations for the RTA's ambitious show, the work the men must do to connect with this more personal piece, G's persistence with Eye and pursuit of his own freedom into a tale that forces the "institution" further and further into the background (the absence of correctional officers during long stretches of the story is notable), until, inevitably, prison presses in again and threatens to mar the beauty and hope we, the audience, have embraced -- maybe naively.

Still, Sing Sing's message about the indomitable human spirit and the incalculable benefit of the arts on one's peace and happiness endures and wraps its arms around you in the end.