With so many solemn subjects coming out of the fall festivals, it’s nice to find a crowd-pleasing charmer offering the most straightforward of stories: a group of lovable misfits decides to put on a show.
As is required with any overly-familiar template, it’s the specifics that stand out. “Superboys of Malegaon,” which premiered on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, is based on the true adventures of amateur director Nasir Shaikh, the star of Faiza Ahmad Khan’s 2012 documentary “Supermen of Malegaon.” Khan’s doc captured some of the fairy-tale qualities of Shaikh’s story, and now director Reema Kagti expands them further with her uplifting fictionalized biopic.
The film begins in 1997, when Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) is an unfocused young man living in the small Indian city of Malegaon. He works in his family’s dilapidated video store, which he’s also turned into a makeshift movie theater. None of his neighbors have money to spare, but they still turn out for his hand-spliced mashups, which blend Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Things fall apart when the corrupt local police shut him down for piracy — but in the grand tradition of inspirational dramedies, this only motivates Nasir to push his passions further.
The solution, he decides, is to make his own movies. He and his friends are loom workers, fruit sellers and “professionally unemployed,” so they figure they have nothing to lose. Their first effort, a satire of the 1975 Hindi classic “Sholay,” is overseen by Nasir and written by his buddy Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh). And to everyone’s surprise but their own, it’s a hit. But — perhaps you can guess where this is going — success is not the cure-all they’d imagined.
The crew fights over vision, money and next steps before breaking apart in anger. Both Nasir and Farogh have big egos and big dreams, and confidently pursue solo careers as a director and screenwriter respectively. But they each learn the hard way that Mumbai’s movie industry isn’t as warm as the one they built in Malegaon. By 2010 the video store has turned into a restaurant, the men haven’t talked in years, and the whole experience feels like a dream. Until, that is, the soft-spoken Shafique (Shashank Arora) gives them one more reason to get the gang back together.
There’s a delightful symmetry to the fact that in the end, the real Nasir and his friends got their own Bollywood-style picture about their Bollywood-style spoofs. Kagti pulls us into their world so convincingly — with a big assist from Sachin Jigar’s enchanting score — that we can’t help rooting for them even as we know exactly where they’ll wind up.
Not everything works seamlessly: Swapnil Sonawane’s subdued cinematography doesn’t match the soulfulness of the characters’ ambitions. The halfhearted romances fall somewhat flat, with the female characters given particularly short shrift throughout the film’s 127 minutes. And sure, much of the actual movie is as broadly earnest as Nasir’s homespun films within the film.
But even the ragged edges add some extra charm. The actors are so committed, and Varun Grover’s script so heartfelt, you’d have to be as cold as one of Farogh’s villains to resist this group’s superpowered sincerity.
