Herman's House

Bhalla’s advocacy gets its force above all from the oddly similar personalities of the two main subjects — Wallace and Sumell — zealous reformers possessed of astonishing optimism, even as Bhalla closes by noting that there are 80,000 prisoners in solitary in the US.

Although this documentary has a powerful political subtext, it is best described as a conceptual art piece about confinement, attached to a dual biography of the artist and the prisoner.

Herman's House is conventionally produced, but it does right by its two uncommon subjects.

A portrait of an invisible man, Herman's House is a raised voice in the constitutional debate over solitary confinement.

Herman's House would benefit from more background material on Wallace, notably about the alleged weakness of the murder rap against him. In the end, though, neither Sumell nor the film is concerned with that. Their goal is to make palpable — and palpably horrific — the fact of living 23 hours a day in caged isolation.

Although it sketchily touches on many provocative issues -- the inhumanity of this form of incarceration, the relationship between the artist and subject -- Herman’s House fails to explore them in a fully satisfying manner.

It’s an absorbing, prickly tale, which Bhalla doesn’t tell as coherently as he could have — oddly fitting, considering this is a story about frustrated ambitions and unfulfilled potential.