(REVIEW) “Sing Sing” is a movie that tells a beautiful true story with arresting authenticity. But the movie so underdeveloped its characters and their stories that it actually holds itself back from the full range of intimacy the filmmakers clearly desire to convey.

“Sing Sing” — the latest film from celebrated independent film studio A24 (“Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Civil War”) — tells the story of Divine G (played by Colman Domingo), imprisoned at a maximum security prison (Sing Sing) for a crime he didn't commit. He finds purpose by acting in a theater group alongside other incarcerated men. 

The film is based on the book “The Sing Sing Follies,” which tells the true story of Divine G and the theater program he founded while incarcerated. It started with one play. The response was so big from the audience, performers and officers that they did another one. That one also garnered the same response. 

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“After that production, we said, you know what? We got something special here,” Divine G recounted. “So we created a program.”

Divine G and the Rehabilitation Through the Arts: Prion Arts Program website boasts that it was so successful that it resulted in only a 3% recidivism rate for participants, despite a national average of 60%. In an era when people are rightly focusing on the broken lives that result from the recidivism rate in the criminal justice system, this is a really exciting issue to focus on. The guards loved it, too, because in order to participate in the program you had to stay out of trouble.

“I was wounded, and my mission in life was to try to heal as many people as I can,” Divine G recalled. “I was in prison for a crime I didn't commit, found evidence of my innocence, and just could not get out. I was stuck. So I decided that any and everything that I would do would be about making the world a better place. I'm not going to let this experience make me bitter. I'm going to make it make me better so that when I walk out of here, I can say, “OK, I lost 25 years of my life, but I gained so much by helping so many people.” 

A big part of Divine G’s journey was also one of faith, which led him to become a minister when he got out of prison. He didn’t take God seriously growing up. 

“Like a lot of people, I grew up in a religious home. My family was Baptist, Southern Baptist, and I wasn’t per se intricately involved in religion when I was young. I mean, it was you're young, you go because your parents go,” he recalled.  

But that all changed when he went to prison.  

“When I got incarcerated for a crime I didn't commit began to look at things differently, very differently,” he added. “I mean, it forces you to look at things differently. And I used to ask myself, I mean, ‘Why is God putting me through this?’ Because I mean, when it's all said and done, I mean I've always, in essence in the background, always believed that there was higher forces at play.”

Not surprisingly, the movie focuses squarely on the stories of redemption. While most stories about prison emphasize the danger or the violence, this movie spends its time on sweet moments, heartbreaking sadness, kindness and vulnerability. Divine G and the new recruit Clarence (played by the real-life Clarence) form the heart of the movie. Clarence slowly starts to open up and let himself be changed by his relationships with others — and others start to be changed by him as well. When the movie hits these notes and themes well, it soars.

The true magic of “Sing Sing” is in the filmmakers’ commitment to capturing the moments when people act the most human because they’re not trying to be. As the RTA members try to help their fellow men in prison be vulnerable and authentic, the filmmakers likewise focus attention on the moments where the performers are doing the least “performing” and doing the most random unscripted-feeling moments. That could be a moment where a person does something silly during an audition and makes everyone laugh or a moment where someone is particularly vulnerable and cries. The movie keeps the exposition and plot-moving dialogue to a minimum, preferring you to get to know the people through the random exchanges if you were overhearing friends talk about their lives in snippets every day for a month. 

Adding to this feeling of authenticity is the fact that so many of the movie’s actors are not professional film actors but rather the actual people the movie is based on, like Clarence Maclin. Coleman Domingo is a regular film actor, but the majority of the other RTA performers are not. This gives a rough realness to their performances. It also adds to the feeling of difference between Divine G and the others because he really is more trained in these things than everyone else is.

“It’s a practice I’ve been really intrigued by,” director Greg Kewedar said. 

He talked about a previous film he worked on, called “Jockey,” which featured real-life jockeys who just held on while they told their stories.  

“We could have gone for hours and hours,” he said. “There’s this alchemy that happens with trained actors in film who are bringing a level of craft that can bring us into moments that only a real mastery over this process can capture the truth. And then you combine that with people with real lived experience who are sharing things with you that could never have been written, they could only have been lived. Then the alchemy of that lifts it up to something transcendent that couldn’t have happened without both of them in concert with each other.” 

But the movie’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Because it focuses so much on “moments” of authenticity and not on developing the stories of the people, there is an ironic shallowness to the film. We don’t know much about Divine G for a good deal of the film. We certainly don’t hear anything about his faith. We don’t know he’s trying to prove his innocence until pretty late. It’s worse for other characters, whom we rarely get to know beyond the pretty formulaic tragic pasts of incarcerated individuals. This leads us to have more distance from the characters rather than more intimacy with them — like they’re a sketch rather than a fully developed painting. 

Of course, “Sing Sing” is not the first movie this year to make a real-life person less interesting by minimizing interesting aspects of their personality, including their faith. “Cabrini” also cut out most references to Mother Cabrini’s faith — which is ironic since she’s a nun — in order to make her a “hero for everyone.” 

But the result was just a less interesting person. Likewise, cutting out Divine G’s faith meant huge parts of his emotional journey were missing. Meanwhile, “Wildcat,” a movie about famous writer Flannery O’Connor made by the nonreligious Ethan Hawke, kept her Catholic faith as a prominent part of the story. The result was a fascinating, multilayered portrayal of an individual that resonated with the religious and nonreligious alike.

“Sing Sing” also tends to set up conflicts, then immediately pay them off rather than developing and escalating them. They establish that Divine G wants Clarence to open up and be vulnerable. Clarence responds by threatening him. Then, practically in the next scene, Clarence is on board. We see Divine G freak out after losing hope he’ll get out of prison. Then in practically the next scene, the film jumps to his reconciliation with the group. This doesn’t give the conflict time to build to a truly emotional payoff, nor does it give us time to peel back the layers of the conflict to truly understand it on a deep level, and therefore see more of ourselves in it.

“Sing Sing” is a worthy story with great performances and many deeply raw and authentic moments that make it unquestionably a recommended watch. If it had only developed its people and their stories as individuals more, it would probably be remembered as an iconic masterpiece classic of prison movies. 

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.