Sing Sing (July 15)

For anyone familiar with This American Life’s Act V from 2002, this is that story dramatized, but with specifics on the incarcerated individuals so vague that you can feel warm and fuzzy about their rehabilitation without thinking too much about the lives they ruined beyond their own family. It is about what you would expect from an arthouse movie about black men performing Shakespeare. A lot of Sad Piano and closeups of hands reaching out of prison cells to touch the air. Vague but profound meditations on what could have been if they had taken a different path. And, as a twist in the regular procession of art mimicking life, all of the actors are formerly incarcerated individuals playing themselves, which neatly protects the film from accusations of being trite depictions of prison life, because it really happened! The profit sharing model for the film seems to provide a way for the film to not be exploitative, but the film feels like a caricature of itself, maudlin, feelsy, Theatrical, lots of circles for men to talk about toxic masculinity and blackness through the lens of King Lear. There are some ways in which the film contains twists on the tropes of Black Men Crying While Performing Art, like the way that they choose a vaudeville comedy instead of a drama, allowing the audience to nod our heads sagely as the prisoners angst over the proper way to deliver jokes like Serious Actors (there’s one Pharaoh character who does this expertly, especially as he sheds the layers of performance one iteration at a time). Coleman Domingo plays a fast-talking, street smart, bookish, tortured artist, which feels very much in his regular wheelhouse, but it’s the performances of his ensemble, especially his supporting lead Mike Mike that really steal the show.

Sing Sing is about 20 years too late to be groundbreaking. All the drama and pathos that one could drain from the story was done more effectively on radio, but it’s surprising it has taken this long for it to make the jump from radio to silver screen. The decision to do the production with amateur actors is interesting in itself and probably more entertaining than the alternatives. One Babadook.