Sing Sing is a movie about acting. Set in the notorious titular prison, known for its executions and high-profile prisoners, a group of incarcerated men form an acting troupe. They each get a role and perform their rehabilitation for an audience. They put on shows about how they’ve changed, transforming through their characters, as they become their new best versions of themselves.

85% of the movie’s cast are actually formerly incarcerated themselves. This is actually their own story they are performing. It’s based on them! But this time, there is a difference, now they get to show us their full process, and perform exactly what that process did for them. It is extraordinary supercharged stuff. Powerful beyond the stage, reaching into the depths of the Actor Experience, and finding something new in the psyche of The Actor.

Sing Sing is immediately singular as an ensemble work, in that the ensemble is such a tight-knit and predefined brotherhood with legitimate lived-in experience and love for one another, that all of this is on the screen. No other movie can claim exactly what it does. And it is so damn moving and resonant, the link between the actors and their pasts are so clear, and so well-considered. Every one of them is excellent. Nobody puts one foot wrong — even in conveying what it is like to be “an amateur,” the actors are so good that we can read them as better than our most renowned professionals. We fall in love with every one of their stories; they are really beautiful people.

Despite being a powerhouse ensemble work, that ensemble is still anchored by the superlative work of actor Colman Domingo (who took a pay cut to provide equity for the cast). Domingo plays Divine G, who has been incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, and lives out his sentence writing and performing plays with the prison’s acting company. He’s a terrific leader and his character is clearly an actor himself — in one of the story’s smartest strokes — his character does not get to play the character of Hamlet, and it’s given to another actor who is just more credible among the group. But the thing is, the other actor needed this role so badly, and it saved him.

The movie finds the ensemble preparing a preposterous play — a mish-mash of everything that appeals to every member of the acting group. They all get to be, for one moment, exactly who they really are — someone defined not by incarceration but by human qualities. They can do this through the fantasy of being a cowboy or a pirate or Hamlet or anything they want. What’s most moving is watching the camaraderie required to piece it all together. It’s a beautiful human story about the power of the group and brotherhood.

Greg Kwedar directs Sing Sing perfectly by allowing it to be about people and faces and the liminal space of this prison. This divide between freedom and imprisonment and life and death is so clearly defined, but on the stage, the actors can escape from these predefined roles, they can become more than who society tells them they now are. They can become themselves. As one of the characters puts it, “Brother, we’re here to become human again.”

10/10