The HBO film is almost unsettling in its authenticity.
Louis Menkins has spent half his life in a maximum-security prison in Indiana.
Twenty-four years.
Now Louis is just weeks away from being released — but he’s filled with apprehension about finding a place in the outside world, and he finds himself at the red-hot center of an escalating conflict within the penitentiary, even though all he wants to do is avoid trouble in these last days before he becomes a free man.
The brilliant Jeffrey Wright plays Louis in the HBO movie “O. G.,” and it is one of the finest performances of his career. Wright can convey a world of emotions with a barely perceptible shift in facial expressions — but when moment calls for it, he can shift gears and pin us to our seats with his fiery intensity.
Filmed at the Pendleton Correctional Facility near Indianapolis and featuring inmates as actors and extras, “O. G.” is a work of fiction and yet is almost unsettling in its authenticity.
Director Madeleine Sackler does a magnificent job of plunging us into this world, in which inmates are almost always seeing things through the bars of their cells, or the tiny windows giving them a glimpse of the sky. Doors and gates are forever opening and closing. Even relatively quiet moments are punctuated by the sounds of somebody yelling, or someone blasting music in the distance.
