Tribeca: Charles Williams' debut feature is a difficult but deeply penetrating story that defies the most obvious tropes of its genre.

The lower-security prisoners in Charles Williams’ difficult but deeply penetrating “Inside” sometimes pass the time by playing the trivia games that are printed on the packaging of their sweets. “WHO AM I?” the text asks, before offering a series of clues about, say, a Brooklyn-born musician who got his first break when Bette Midler hired him as a pianist. Most of the characters in this decidedly grounded Australian prison drama are too young — and too many worlds removed — to know who Barry Manilow is, let alone guess his identity based on a handful of factoids. But that doesn’t stop these men from trying, even if they spend every day of their sentences trying to separate their souls from the bullet points of their own biographies. Are they more than what they’ve done? The people they’ve hurt? The situations they were born into?

We know they are. Not because they’re human, and we have the natural grace to extend these murderers the courtesy of that recognition, but rather because this film wouldn’t have any reason to exist if the answer to any of those questions was “no.” The abundant power of Williams’ debut feature — which stems from his experience growing up in an economically dispossessed Victoria town whose jail was like a second home for several of the men in his family — is rooted in the fact that “Inside” never pretends otherwise.