This week, I caught two Oscar-nominated films I’d missed in theaters, both now streaming, that explore different sides of what it means to produce art in front of an audience. A Complete Unknown (Disney+, Hulu, rentable) tells the story of one of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of the century, while Sing Sing (Max, rentable) profiles a troupe of thespians who really were, until this movie, close to unknown.
That’s because they were inmates of the maximum-security prison of the title. Director-cowriter Greg Kwedar based the drama on John H. Richardson’s 2005 Esquire article about a unique play produced under the auspices of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a program devoted to giving inmates artistic outlets. The cast is largely composed of actual former inmates such as the rightly acclaimed Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who play themselves alongside actors.
Colman Domingo received an Oscar nod for his performance as John “Divine G” Whitfield, one of the founders of the program. Imprisoned since youth for a murder he claims he didn’t commit, Divine G is a thoughtful author and actor devoted to helping other inmates navigate the legal system. But he’s only human, so he’s miffed when Divine Eye, a tough-talking drug dealer whom he recruited for the program, subtly challenges his authority.
The newcomer proposes the troupe put on a comedy instead of a serious drama penned by Divine G. Their director (Paul Raci, Oscar nominated for Sound of Metal) gamely concocts a wacky time-travel saga featuring elements from every actor’s wish list: ancient Egyptians, gladiators, Freddy Krueger, Hamlet. Seasoned Shakespearean Divine G auditions for the prince of Denmark. But the part goes to Divine Eye, who struggles with “To be or not to be.”
Kwedar gives the movie a documentary-esque structure, keeping some pivotal moments off-screen, so that we feel like a journalist who has only limited access to the characters. The authenticity of the setting and performances keeps us invested as we watch Divine G and the cynical, wary Divine Eye evolve from rivals to peers to friends.
In a more conventional prison movie, everything would lead to a big climax in which Divine Eye wows the audience as Hamlet. While he does get his moment, the focus of Sing Sing is elsewhere: on the power of theater itself. Raci’s character points out that acting gives men permission to be emotionally vulnerable. Sure enough, rehearsals become occasions for the inmates to express their real hopes, fears and frustrations, even as they relish an escape into fiction.
There’s nothing corny or bleeding-heart about Sing Sing‘s promotion of theater as a healing force for the working-class man’s soul (also the theme of the excellent recent drama Ghostlight). This movie makes a powerful case for the kind of programs that are currently on the federal chopping block.
When Divine G recruits Divine Eye, it’s because he sees the artistry that goes into building a drug dealer’s personal mythos. The link between artists and outlaws would be no surprise to Bob Dylan, the subject of James Mangold’s biopic, which was nominated for Best Picture and seven other Oscars.
A Complete Unknown opens in 1961 with the young Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) meeting his folk idols, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton); it closes in 1965 with his controversial electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival. This is the story of a progression — from nobody to celebrity — but also of a clearly defined phase. By the end, Dylan has alienated most of the folkies with whom he connected at the beginning, friends who helped him along the road to fame yet arguably also held him back.
The screenplay (by Mangold, Elijah Wald and Jay Cocks) can be too on the nose, particularly in its handling of historical context. (There are a few too many shots of Dylan chain-smoking his way through news reports of the Cuban Missile Crisis and other watershed events.) Overall, however, the filmmakers steer clear of the usual musical biopic hagiography by taking a deliberate and bracing distance from their subject.
In many scenes, the point-of-view character is not Dylan himself but Seeger or Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) or Dylan’s on-and-off girlfriend (Elle Fanning). And their perspective isn’t always flattering.
Baez, Dylan’s collaborator and sometimes lover, says it best: “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” she notes after Dylan derides her own compositions as music for dentists’ offices. He doesn’t deny it. Chalamet’s young Dylan is nerdy, cocky and competitive — he knows his own talent, but he’s not above taking potshots at more successful artists. Determined to control the narrative, he obscures his origins and insists his theatrical sensibility was shaped by working in a carnival. He’s elusive, infuriating and only sometimes funny enough to compensate for it.
We’ve all known self-styled troubadour man-children like this — but they couldn’t write songs like Dylan. While most music biopics are all about connecting the art to the artist’s personal travails, A Complete Unknown suggests that Dylan found his strength precisely in being unknown — the excitement of pure potential and continual evolution, or what John Keats called “negative capability.”
When Dylan buys a penny whistle on the street and incorporates it into a track, he’s improvising, channeling the same performer’s intuition as the incarcerated actors in Sing Sing. While one film brings its characters to a catharsis, the other channels all of its famous subject’s emotional evolution into his on-screen performances. Both deliver exhilarating moments aplenty.