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There’s a gap in the bars of B Wing at Sing Sing, the notorious maximum security prison that serves as the setting for Greg Kwedar’s gripping inside story of the same name. Through the opening, a man can reach out and shake his hand with the outside air. New inmate Divine Eye, a particularly difficult case even here, doesn’t see the point in this, and when longtime slave Divine G takes him there for a quiet chat, he suspects he’s being lured into a trap. This is the kind of paranoia you might expect from the exercise yard’s biggest tyrant. What you might not expect is that he also quotes King Lear.
John Whitfield, aka Divine G, just wants to talk theater. He’s a founding member of a troupe formed as part of the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. Colman Domingo teaches him how to live, how to breathe, think and feel. G’s best friend is Caribbean drug dealer Mike-Mike (Sean San José) and the rest of the group is played by former RTA members. Clarence Maclin, the real-life Divine Eye, plays his former self: arrogant and vicious, but strangely vulnerable. His greatest fear, he tells G, is that he’ll never be anything but a gangster.
The mix of real actors and non-actors can be chaotic, but it works seamlessly here thanks to a script by Kwedar and Clint Bentley that plays to everyone’s strengths. That goes for the occasional documentary crossovers, where the characters tell their own stories to the camera. You could argue that the tension and boredom of prison life are underplayed – but anyone who has seen enough prison dramas knows that. The upside is the abundance of priceless moments and anecdotes that no outsider could dream up.
Creating these stories is the usual work of putting on a stage show: arguing about what to do, auditions, rehearsals, nervousness before the curtain goes up. The new production, Cracking the Mummy’s Codewas written to order by their flown-in director, Brent Buell (Paul Raci, who is surprisingly energetic as a little man who is at ease among hardened criminals). The clips of the real film we see during the credits, which include everything from a disintegrating Egyptian mummy to Freddy Krueger, look terrible, but creating great art is not the priority. As one tattooed tough guy says, he’s been acting all his life; it’s about finding new roles.
Gradually, G and Divine Eye discover a shared spirit, mutual loyalty, even a certain softness between them. Meanwhile, director Kwedar develops a fluid visual language to express this smoothness, using side angles and every opportunity to open up a larger space to enliven the prison gray. Occasional waves of music reinforce this emotional content. Mostly, though, we look at the men’s faces. It is their story, after all, even if it is told as fiction and many rough edges have been smoothed out. At least Singing Singing makes it possible for silenced voices to be heard.
★★★★☆
In British cinemas from 30 August
