The simplicity of this moment and the bleak truth that it lays bare about the millions of people living in nondescript Indian towns will hit you like a bucket of bricks. The license to dream that the youth of tier-1 India takes for granted is an unthinkable luxury for the rest. Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon is brimming with such iridescent moments of emotional authenticity.
Written by Varun Grover, it’s inspired by Faiza Ahmad Khan’s globe-trotting 2012 documentary Supermen of Malegaon that zooms in on Malegaon’s makeshift movie industry and its epicenter Nasir Shaikh. Fueled by his love for cinema and with the support of his friends, he made hyperlocal parodies of blockbusters such as Sholay, Shaan, and Superman in the 1990s and 2000s.
Superboys of Malegaon captures their movie adventures between 1997 and 2011. The love for cinema is so deeply embedded in the film, that it informs every action, each frame, all dialogue and conflicts. At 131 minutes, it’s a film about crazies. Remember Emma Stone’s Audition (The Fools Who Dream) song from Damien Chazelle’s 2016 film La La Land? Superboys of Malegaon is its cinematic version.
Movies aren’t just an escape or a flight of fantasy for these superboys, they also make their reality more bearable, livable. The film opens with them getting through their day, rushing to get the best seats at a theatre so they can forget themselves and all else in a darkened room for a few precious hours. When one of them is diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, the doctor breaks the news by saying “Wahi jo Anand me Rajesh Khanna ko hua tha.” When a director promises to return his wife the money she gives him to make a movie, she simply says, “I don’t want the money. Just give me the producer’s credit in the film.” It is because of cinema that the superboys fight. It is because of it that they reunite. It is through film that they show love. It is through it that they try to make sense of loss. It gives them meaning, shapes their identity. It is how they see the world. It is what they dream of and wake up with.
Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) is a wedding videographer who also helps his elder brother run a small theatre in Malegaon. In the era of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Judwaa and Raja Hindustani, he plays Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, and Buster Keaton but without much success. After a police crackdown because of piracy, he decides to make his own films.
His barebones, makeshift troupe largely consists of his friends. The meek and always loyal Shafique (Shashank Arora) works at a factory, Farogh (Vineet Singh) is a broke, idealist writer, Akram (Anuj Duhan) runs a photo studio, Irfan (Saqib Ayub) sells dry-fruit, and Aleem (Pallav Singh) teaches at a local school. They decide to embark upon their shared, fledgling dream with Malegaon Ki Sholay, a spoof of Ramesh Sippy’s mega-hit by and for the people of their town.
A charming cocktail of indie and mainstream that cares to acknowledge margins but not enough to push them, Superboys of Malegaon fits neatly into the Excel and Tiger Baby template. Bathed in gorgeous, diffused light and elevated by standout performances, the film throws at you plenty to think about. In a decade marked by bloated, jingoistic spectacles, it dares to place at its center working-class muslims. The film also deftly dabbles with art vs commerce and art vs artist dilemmas.
It’s self aware enough to recognize the farce of Varun Grover making Farogh shout, “Writer baap hota hai” in an ecosystem infamous for undervaluing its writers. Juggling with the uneasy discourse around originality and derivativeness in art, it is also self aware enough to understand the irony of it being a feature film that draws from a documentary based on men who riffed off popular movies.
Superboys of Malegaon revels in the little details. As the story leaps through time, so does the tech. Cameras change, VHS tapes give way to CDs. Computers, digital screens emerge. The film has a strong imprint of some of Akhtar siblings’ best work. The socio-economic milieu is reminiscent of Gully Boy. Nasir’s self-centeredness, the auditions for Malegaon Ki Sholay and the art vs artist debate is not too unlike that in Luck By Chance. A friend’s fatal diagnosis reuniting the gang will take you back to Rock On. The Nasir-Farogh equation has shades of Akash-Sid from Dil Chahta Hai.
Women do not have much to do in this tale of superboys. However, despite limited scope, Muskkaan Jaferi is solid as Nasir’s lawyer wife. But in a film bursting with memorable performances, watch out for Manjiri Pupala. She is a revelation as Trupti, a local performer who Nasir casts for the role of Basmati (their version of Sholay’s Basanti). Oscillating between real and reel, she gives language to the imposter syndrome, the dissonance that artists often feel with their work in a lovely scene with Shashank Arora at a bus stop. It’s another meta movie moment that will live rent free in my head for days.
