I Know Why the Caged Bird Acts

Film: Sing Sing
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Who is the best actor working today? There are a lot of good answers for this, some who have been working for years and some up and comers who are making names for themselves. Colman Domingo might be the easiest to overlook in some ways despite two Oscar nominations in as many years. With Rustin, he was the best thing in the film by far. With Sing Sing, he is an outstanding part of an outstanding whole.

Sing Sing is a prison movie in the sense that it takes place in prison, but it’s not the sort of prison movie that you are thinking of. This is no made-on-the-cheap “sexy women behind bars” film, nor is it the story of gang vengeance or learning to live on the inside. It’s not a film about an escape attempt. Sing Sing takes place in prison, but it is about the transformative power of art. It’s cliché to say that a movie about prison is actually about freedom, but it is—and about why art matters and should matter.

Divine G (Domingo) is in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit, and that he has found some possible evidence of someone else admitting to. This has not prevented the parole board from keeping him in prison. Divine G has poured himself into a program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) that uses theater as a way to help the inmates. He has become the main playwright and one of the main actors of the group, which operates under the direction of Brent Buell (Paul Raci).

The group begins a new production, but decides not to do a heavy drama has they have been doing, wanting to do a comedy instead. Brent writes a play that incorporates everything they wanted—cowboys, time travel, Egyptians, Freddy Kruger, and more. Divine G is convinced that he is appropriate for the one dramatic role, a version of Hamlet added to the play. This role instead goes to Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), a newcomer to the group who doesn’t seem to see the value in acting or any of this.

So is the film about Divine Eye learning the value of what he does on stage? Sure, but it’s also about Divine G dealing with the fact that the system is rigged against him, and that the plays he writes and acts in may not have the power to truly change anything in the real world, or that the RTA is something that only looks good on paper but has no value in terms of the parole board. These possible truths hit harder with the death of his friend Mike Mike (Sean San José) and Divine Eye’s successful parole hearing.

The story itself is an extremely compelling one. It would be hard for it not to be, frankly. There are aspects of it that do feel like we’re going to get exactly what we think we are going to get—a movie about people in prison trying to find something that equates to freedom is what we expect to see the minute we see the brick walls and razor wire. But genre tropes exist for a reason, and in this case, the tropes don’t take us to something that we shrug over because we knew it was coming. Instead, the realization of these story elements feel like when a piece of music finally resolves on that note or chord we’ve been waiting for. It feels right and whole.

Sing Sing is based on a true story about a real man named John Whitfield, who appears briefly in the film. It’s also the case that the bulk of the members of the RTA in the film are actually former inmates from Ossining prison who are graduates of the RTA program.

I know that it sounds sappy to say that this is an uplifting film about the power of theater and writing, but it’s absolutely the case. I challenge someone to watch this and claim to be unmoved at the end. Much of this is because it really focuses on the men in the program and what it is doing. Divine G’s desperate hope to be successful in his parole hearing moves a great deal of the film, but it never feels like the focus of the film. Instead, the focus is on how everything that is happening around these men affects the play they are trying to put on.

I said it at the top—Colman Domingo needs to be included in any list of the best actors currently working. You can point to a few films that demonstrate this, but none of them is the complete package that Sing Sing is. How the hell was this overlooked for a Best Picture nomination?

Why to watch Sing Sing: Colman Domingo is one of the best actors working today.
Why not to watch: No good reason. This is what movies should be.