‘Superboys of Malegaon’ review: The town that made movies

“Small cell carcinoma,” the doctor begins. Two blank faces stare at him. “Have you seen Anand?” he tries again. “What happened to Rajesh Khanna.”

The simple point of Superboys of Malegaon is that, even at its bleakest, life can be made sweeter by cinema. The Anand reference softens the blow of a cancer diagnosis for two movie-crazy men who’ve travelled from the small town of Malegaon in Maharashtra. When they get back, the patient’s friends gently rib him about having a rich man’s ailment. Even the doctor’s life is made a little happier. He accepts a part in their upcoming film in return for home visits, saying he’d always wanted to be an actor but his father forbade it.

Thirteen years earlier, Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) and Shafique (Shashank Arora) are on a motorbike, singing an improvised tune about not being too ambitious because they’ll end up dying in Malegaon anyway. It’s an early acceptance of the cards they’ve been dealt: Nasir to shoot wedding videos and work in his brother’s photo studio, Shafique in the mill. 

Like Lou Reed said of life before rock ‘n roll, there was nothing happening at all. Cinema offers an escape—Nasir runs a local cinema—but not a lifeline. Out of nowhere, the unlikely combination of Buster Keaton and Raja Hindustani turn Nasir onto editing. He experiments on his theatre audience, splicing Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee into Chaplin and Keaton films (the juxtaposition makes more sense with Chan, an avowed fan of silent comedy). Encouraged by the response, he announces he’ll direct a film in Malegaon. 

Nasir attracts a few friends and acquaintances to his cause—Shafique, writer Farogh (Vineet Singh), Akram (Anuj Duhan), Irfan (Saqib Ayub) and Aleem (Pallav Singh). He picks a subject: Ramesh Sippy’s classic Sholay, done Malegaon-style, in their dialect, with shoutouts to local establishments. Actors are selected from an open call; Basmati (their Basanti) is offered to a visiting dancer, Trupti (Manjiri Pupala), whose starry demands involve a makeup room (she gets a parked auto with a curtain) and orange juice. Progress is choppy, there’s barely any money, but somehow production stumbles on. Finally, it’s done and in the local cinema. And it’s a hit.

Amazingly, this all happened. In the late '90s, Nasir Shaikh of Malegaon made a no-budget version of Sholay shot, scripted and acted by locals. Other ramshackle films followed. In 2008, Faiza Ahmad Khan made a delightful documentary, Supermen of Malegaon, on the unlikely filmmaking scene in the town. It’s this documentary that’s the basis for Kagti’s film, with a script by Varun Grover.

“Remember, the writer is king,” Farogh yells at one point. This is as untrue for shoestring filmmaking as it is for Bollywood; Grover, who’s been both writer and director, knows this better than anyone. Kagti’s direction is sure but not particularly ambitious, content to serve up warm vibes and touch hearts. It's the writing that elevates Superboys, painting an affectionate, lived-in picture of a nondescript town. Even the smallest characters come alive, from Nasir’s sympathetic lawyer wife to the tea stall owner who would be Amitabh Bachchan. Along with dialogue writer Shoaib Zulfi Nazeer, Grover captures the musicality of the local speech. Of the many wonderfully crafted lines, my favourite is when Forogh is hesitating to come home from a stint in Mumbai, and is reassured by a friend who says that when a son of the town returns, people only see their long-absent face, not their empty hands. 

For all its non-disruptive smoothness, Superboys of Malegaon does nag at one uncomfortable question: can a director be a good person? Nasir doesn’t do anything drastic; it’s just that his every decision is taken to benefit his films, whether that means making promises he knows he can’t keep or cutting a friend’s big scene during the edit. Adarsh Gourav is a good fit for Nasir—as an actor, he never seems to put all his cards on the table. But I was moved by two other performances. Vineet Singh, whom we just saw as a cheerful poet in an angry film, here plays an angry poet in a cheerful film. An actor who struggled for years to get noticed, engineered his own breakthrough, yet still hasn’t quite found a foothold, it’s tempting to think he channels some of himself into the alcoholic, idealistic, frustrated Forogh. And Shashank Arora as the loyal, timid Shafique is touching long before the film insists that we feel sorry for him. 

There’s a beautiful scene with Shafique and Trupti by the roadside at night, waiting for the bus that’ll take her home. “I really want to be an actor,” he says. “How does it feel, to see yourself on the big screen?” “Oh, that’s not me,” she smiles. “I’m at the Malegaon stop, waiting for the bus to Nashik.” Superboys of Malegaon ends with a little tribute to the real men and women who inspired the film. They’ve already had their endeavors documented, but now they’re truly characters, on more screens than they could've ever imagined, yet no longer themselves. I wonder if they’d watch this film and say, that’s not me.