Sing Sing review – Colman Domingo is larger than life in big-hearted prison musical

There’s charm, energy and optimism in this big-hearted film, inspired by the Rehabilitation Through the Arts project that teaches theatre skills to US prisoners. The movie’s genesis is an Esquire magazine article from 2005 about an ensemble fantasy-comedy musical performed by inmates of Sing Sing maximum security facility in New York state. The movie invites us to hear the words in the title as joyful imperatives. It is performed largely by genuine former inmates playing themselves, featuring rehearsal scenes interspersed with variously tense or moving private conversations. There is a resemblance to Alan Parker’s Fame, to which the film playfully alludes, although the proceedings are evidently too serious to allow for the more obvious comparison with Max Bialystock’s song Prisoners of Love at the end of The Producers.

Everything here is so uplifting that it seems churlish to find fault. But however rousing and admirably intended, there is something surreal and out of place in the characterisation of its leading role, which is dominatingly and fascinatingly played by the excellent Colman Domingo, whose many awards include the London critics’ circle prize for innovation named after the late Derek Malcolm . Domingo plays John “Divine G” Whitfield, an inmate who was in real life a visionary and inspirational driving force behind the Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme and wrote many plays for it. The real Divine G has a cameo, while the group’s star player, a serious tough guy who was transformed by his encounter with Shakespeare, is Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, here playing himself and doing so very capably. Most of the other roles also are played by former prisoners, but the group’s director, Brent Buell, is played by Paul Raci (known for the 2019 film Sound of Metal, in which he was the deafness-therapy counsellor being tough on Riz Ahmed).

Whitfield realises that Divine Eye has some real untapped talent, and that he could be redeemed by the artistic process. Divine Eye is threatening another inmate with a very serious beating for an unpaid debt. Could the theatre’s spiritual healing cause him to forget all about it? And there is Whitfield’s own private agony: if his request for parole is denied, will all this theatre stuff feel meaningless?

Domingo’s Whitfield looks in fact every inch a seasoned Broadway star: witty, stylish, elegant and dapper, and something of a celebrity – another prisoner actually asks for his autograph – but also self-deprecating and thoughtful, always ready to listen to others’ creative input. It’s a really engaging and sympathetic performance – but it is utterly, and almost bafflingly, different from everyone else’s, and the real Whitfield is not really anything like that. At times, Domingo is like an imprisoned Henry Irving. Domingo clearly does not want to downplay his performance or create a social-realist approximation of the real performers’ personalities, or indeed Whitfield’s actual personality. He’s bigger than that, and while it makes for a very absorbing spectacle, it is oddly out of joint with the rest of the cast, and always in danger of upstaging Maclin, who in some ways is the film’s key character. Well, it’s an intriguing filmic tribute to the rehabilitation programme: effective altruism in action.

• Sing Sing is at the Edinburgh film festival and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 30 August.