At the maximum security Sing Sing Correctional Facility, discipline and punishment are doled out arbitrarily. At the sound of an alarm, the entire inmate population, no matter where they are or what they’re doing, must immediately dive to the ground, arms outstretched, palms down. Random searches for contraband are regularly conducted and leave cells looking like victims of a small tornado. Inmates live under the thumb of an oppressive and violent system that rarely “corrects” and often traumatizes.

Hollywood frequently dramatizes the ubiquitous terrors of life in prison, but the narrative requirements of film rarely allow for an accurate depiction of the sheer monotony that marks the lives of the incarcerated.

Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing strikes this balance through its depiction of a small group of inmates warding off debilitating boredom and inhumane tedium with play, more specifically with acting and performing. Led by John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo), an innocent author fighting for an unlikely parole release, the film follows the men of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program as they produce, rehearse, and perform their latest play.

Sing Sing does not feel like a film about prison, predominantly because there are so many moments of levity and genuine humor. This comes through especially in the first half, as the theater troupe debates the merits of performing yet another work of Shakespeare versus a play of their creation involving time-traveling pirates, cowboys, and Egyptian princes. Despite taking place in a deeply oppressive environment, the film centers the inner lives of inmates as opposed to focusing on the daily trauma the men endure within the prison system.

Domingo plays Divine G as gentle, if not slightly conceited, often acting as the translator and mediator between Sing Sing’s drama coach and inmates less experienced in the humanities. He is the troupe’s rock, one of the founding members of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and someone the group frequently looks to for guidance on how to open themselves to vulnerability and coax out their best performances. Divine G finds this role threatened when a new inmate is brought into the group: Divine Eyes, played with tender intensity by Clarence Maclin, an alumni of the real-life theater program at Sing Sing.

Divine Eyes comes into the group as an outsider, a prison yard alpha who interrupts rehearsals to snap at other actors for simply walking behind him on stage. He’s accepted his lot in life, but his anger about it is palpable. Over time, this corrosive rage softens and becomes raw material for his onstage performance as Prince Hamlet. Simultaneously, Divine G finds his ability to perform fading away as he falls into fits of hopelessness and rage when his efforts to gain parole prove unsuccessful. The two Divines perform an almost complete reversal by the end of the film, one going from a place of hope and trust in the universe to right the wrongs that got him in prison in the first place to a state of perpetual rage and complete distancing from his inner self and vice versa.

Beyond its penchant for humor, the film operates in an odd place in terms of genre, oscillating somewhere between fiction and documentary so gracefully that you might not even realize it’s happening. In a scene where inmates are auditioning for the coveted roles in their time-travel comedy production, Kwedar lets the camera roll longer than one might expect, showing not just the inmate’s audition, but their unique warmups and cooldowns, their moments of uncertainty on how they did. It’s in these moments that one might realize all of the actors portraying the theater troupe are actual alumni of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program who once stood on the makeshift stage at Sing Sing. And they’re playing themselves.

More unscripted moments like this occur, but not nearly enough for a film about human imagination and play. I’d be interested in seeing a slightly less-formed version of this film that allows the performers space to play beyond the limits of a script. The grace and spirited liveliness of the film comes and goes, naturally complemented by the banal tragedies that are inevitable for incarcerated people. From scene to scene, the tone can shift abruptly from devastation to joy. Tragedy layers on top of innocent delight. The act of imagination and play on stage is the only thing that marks the passage of time for them while living within the walls of Sing Sing.

The camera often lingers on symmetrical elements of the prison’s architecture, highlighting a sense of sameness and monotony that marks the days of Sing Sing’s inmates. Forced to keep the action in such a limited, walled-off location, Kwedar infuses many scenes with a natural, earthy color palette, a reference maybe to the inmate’s search for joy and beauty in an ugly place.

Sing Sing offers a similar pursuit for viewers: an opportunity to share a laugh in a place of horror, a lesson in how to feel human when surrounded by inhumane conditions. Despite its reliance on the overly familiar, if not slightly saccharine, idea that art is healing, the film quietly and gently insists on vulnerability and empathy as far more valuable healing tools than jailing and confining.

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