Sing Sing
First screened in July 2024 / Most recently screened and reviewed in March 2025
Director: Greg Kwedar. Cast: Colman Domingo, Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin, Sean San José, Paul Raci, Sean "Dino" Johnson, Jon-Adrian "JJ" Velazquez, David "Dap" Giraudy, Patrick "Preme" Griffin, Dario Peña, James "Big E" Williams, Miguel Valentine, Mosi Eagle, Camillo Lovacco, Pedro Cotto, Brent Buell, Michael Capra, Johnny Simmons, John "Divine G" Whitfield, Sharon Washington, Cornell "Nate" Alston. Screenplay: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin, and John "Divine G" Whitfield (based on the article "The Sing Sing Follies" by John H. Richardson).

 In Brief: I had some gripes about rhythm and modulation, but the mix of tender and tough is remarkable, as is the unique ensemble.

VOR: ④  Processes of finance and production may have as long a legacy as the actual film, which is plenty distinctive in point of view and cultural window.


   
Photo © 2023 Black Bear / Marfa Productions /
Edith Productions, © 2024 A24
I fell hard for this movie on sight in July, even without the tremendous bonus of the eloquent, open-hearted Colman Domingo Q&A that followed it, and setting aside the generally rapturous audience reception that electrified that theater space. Even amid their excitement and fannish swooning*, you could tell that people were humbled by the life stories they had just witnessed, as recreated and as lived in real time before the lens.

I am savoring Sing Sing even more now on second pass, and after a few hours of reading up on backstory, including the 2005 Esquire article that was the key source text for the script. Loving a movie doesn't mean being blind to its limits, and to me, Sing Sing has some important ones. I get that this story isn't about the millennia-hopping Pharaonic-Egypt-by-way-of-Elm-Street musical fantasia that the inmates are all cobbling together—purposefully farcical, because they all need the laughs, and purposeful in its loony time-travel, so as to include everyone's ideas for era and plot. The movie's tagline, reiterated often in the screenplay, is "Trust the Process." This isn't about end result, nor about a buildup to madcap zaniness. Still, Sing Sing is so bashful about the culminating spectacle that it almost seems to be embarrassed by it, cutting around the inmates' play like an actor's performance that just didn't click in the editing room. That choice blunts the story's trajectory and undermines the ensemble breadth that has been a narrative and ethical crux throughout. Around the same time, the big dress rehearsal scene where Colman Domingo's "Divine G" Whitfield can't carry everything anymore and finally blows his top feels a bit too much like a Big Actorly Scene and suggests a calculated design—let's see how long before this guy cracks! This flare-up feels too studied in its very excess, and out of step with the palpably empathetic, impressively organic movie surrounding it, which at its consistent best privileges life unfolding, not engineered climaxes.

Yeah yeah, yadda yadda. The real headline is that Sing Sing is a heart-stopping study of male vulnerability, male camaraderie, male rivalry, and mutual aid among men in a shared and terrible circumstance. How often do we see that, with such a richly beating heart? You don't need to hear a single contributor's testimony to discern that everyone on screen poured a lot of themselves and whole decades of emotion and experience into this project. Everyone looks so fulfilled up there, even while they're very convincing in telegraphing exhaustion, uncertainty, or spiritual dehydration. The 16mm photography lends a beautiful, lustrous texture to a movie unexpectedly filled with light—as much a challenge to Cinéma du Big House conventions as the repudiation of showers and shanks and prison-yard standoffs. Improvised moments or cast-authored speeches are recurrent sources of poetry and truth-telling, but principal co-writers Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley also yield some killer moments, from "Are you acting right now?" to the tactful, painful, elliptical mini-portrait Divine G offers to Divine Eye when asked about the children he never sees. I don't know where on this ad-libbed-to-scripted spectrum to place Cornell "Nate" Alston's third-act monologue as a surprise guest to the therapy circle (complex about life, in grief for a pit bull), but whatever it is, it's magical.

Sing Sing has the rhythm and tonality of a spontaneous experience but betrays some well-wrought, three-act structure: the first third ends precisely when Divine Eye can't make himself give his big soliloquy, and the second culminates in someone going to sleep for the last time (perchance to dream, but probably not). Domingo is prodigious but also life-sized throughout. As much as he loves a big, wide brush and works adroitly with it, he also knows what to do with a scalpel, especially around Divine G's artistic vanity and wounded ego, and at each beat of the early-release hearing. Clarence Maclin is breathtakingly present and readable, especially as a non-actor and for someone honoring at all times the fundamental guardedness of his character. But as much as these two become the foci of Sing Sing's tough, tender ellipse, other men are just as indelible and as rewarding to the up-close camera: JJ Velazquez's cirrus and cumulus clouds of emotion, Sean San José's topcoat of puckishness on a canvas of drift and despair, Sean "Dino" Johnson's round-eyed earnestness and his Ghost Dog-y penchant for balancing the limber with the lopsided.

Sing Sing might have benefited from being even five minutes longer: it feels like we miss a middle-to-late stop on Divine Eye's and Divine G's long and twisty road trip with each other's spirits, and we really do need just a tad more of Breaking the Mummy's Code, to own the extravagant tomfoolery as gladly as the characters do and to let these impressively gifted side-performers do a little more of their thing. But sometimes a movie that skips a couple courses or miscalculates some portions is many times more satiating than a film that served all the right amounts of all the right things but could have used more flavor. Sing Sing is all flavor, all feeling, which isn't to shortchange its well-calibrated form, including some of 2024's punchiest close-ups and most enveloping conversations. I like this flawed but forceful film quite a lot, but more than that, I love this frigging movie. Grade: B


* P.S. I swooned as much as anybody, and knowing that I would, I hand-wrote Colman Domingo a long letter of admiration and gratitude for his body of work, seized the right moment to hand-deliver it, and came away with a big, memorable hug. Always be prepared, Boy Scouts! And by all means meet your heroes.

Academy Award Nominations:
Best Actor: Colman Domingo
Best Adapted Screenplay: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin, and John "Divine G" Whitfield
Best Original Song: "Like a Bird"

Golden Globe Nominations:
Best Actor (Drama): Colman Domingo

Other Awards:
National Society of Film Critics: Best Actor (Domingo)
Boston Society of Film Critics: Best Ensemble Cast
Chicago Film Critics Association: Most Promising Performer (Maclin)
National Board of Review: Best Adapted Screenplay
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