Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.There is a gap in the grille surrounding B-wing in Sing Sing, the notorious maximum-security prison that is the setting for Greg Kwedar’s gripping inside story of the same name. The opening allows a man to reach out and shake hands with the outside air. New inmate Divine Eye, a notably hard case even here, can’t see the point of it, so when long-serving lag Divine G takes him there for a quiet talk, he suspects he is being lured into a trap. You might expect that kind of paranoia from the exercise yard’s prime bully. What you might not expect is that he also quotes King Lear.John Whitfield, aka Divine G, just wants to talk about theatre. A founding member of a troupe formed under the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme, he is brought to breathing, thinking, feeling life by Colman Domingo. G’s best friend is Caribbean drug dealer Mike-Mike (Sean San José) and the rest of the group are all played by RTA alumni. Clarence Maclin, the real Divine Eye, plays his own former self: posturing and vicious but oddly vulnerable. His great fear, he tells G, is that he will never be anything but a gangster.Mixing real actors and amateurs can be messy, but thanks to a script by Kwedar and Clint Bentley that plays to everyone’s strengths, it works seamlessly here. So do the periodic sideways moves into documentary, with characters telling their own stories to camera. Arguably, the tension and tedium of life in incarceration are underplayed — but anyone who has seen their fair share of prison dramas brings that awareness with them. The upside is the rich lode of priceless moments and anecdotes that no outsider could devise.Framing those stories is the familiar business of putting on a stage show: arguing over what to perform, auditioning, rehearsing, nerves before the curtain goes up. The new production, Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, is written to order by their shipped-in director Brent Buell (Paul Raci, buzzing with energy as a small man strikingly at ease among felons). The clips of the real thing we see during the end titles, which include everything from an unravelling Egyptian mummy to Freddy Krueger, look terrible, but making great art isn’t the priority. As one tattooed hard man says: he’s been acting all his life; the point is to find new roles.Very gradually, G and Divine Eye discover a common spirit, mutual loyalty, even a softness between them. Meanwhile, director Kwedar devises a fluid visual language to express that pliancy, using sidelong angles and every opportunity to open up a larger space to enliven the prison grey. Intermittent tides of music bulk up this emotional content. Mostly, however, we look at the men’s faces. It is their story, after all, even if it is rendered as fiction, with a lot of rough smoothed in that process. At the very least, Sing Sing allows silenced voices to be heard.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from August 30
