There’s a moment in “Superboys of Malegaon” where Nasir (Adarsh Gourav), a young aspiring filmmaker, watches a Bruce Lee movie with his girlfriend. When she laments how sad it is that Lee died so young, Nasir turns to her and says: “He’s not dead. Just look! See how he kicks.”
Film, Nasir believes, can make you immortal. And he aims to gain a little bit of immortality in his lifetime.
“Superboys of Malegaon,” inspired by the 2008 documentary “Supermen of Malegaon,” is based on the life of Nasir Shaikh and other amateur filmmakers from the small town of Malegaon, India, a place primarily known for its loom industry rather than its movies. Despite that, Nasir and his friends work their tails off making parodies of popular Indian movies, taking the melodrama and glamour of those films and turning them into something that fits more with their scrappy, small town sensibility.
“Superboys of Malegaon” starts in 1997 and stretches forward several years in time, separated into three distinct sections. The middle section gets a little sloppy, characterized by the types of tropes you might see in the very movies that the filmmakers on screen are attempting to parody. But when Nasir and his friends are working on a movie set, the film taps into the magic of moviemaking with real heart and gumption.
“Superboys of Malegaon” immediately sets up its titular location as the type of place that’s hard to get away from. Over the course of the film, multiple characters dream of going to Mumbai but recognize it as a pipedream. If they do end up going – like the character of Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh), who wants to write movies – they’re met with scorn and hardship along the way. In one scene, Nasir and his friend Shafique (Shashank Arora) are riding together on a motorcycle looking upwards as an airplane passes them by. They start singing over the sound of the gurgling engine: “Why dream of flying high? In Malegoan, you will die.”
Nasir is the quintessential underdog hero. He’s the big dreamer, the one in town that everyone – even characters with dreams of their own, like Farogh – sees as overly idealistic. He’s a bit of a film nerd, and that separates him from the bulk of his community. He and his brother run a small video parlor, but Nasir prefers to program the films of Buster Keaton and Bruce Lee over the big movies coming out of Bollywood – a fact that his brother laments is losing them business compared to their competitors. When Nasir has the idea to stitch the best action sequences from the likes of Keaton, Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Chan into one big movie (a choice which also serves to prove just how much all four of those stars have in common), the parlor’s audience starts to grow. But after the police cry piracy and crack down on Nasir’s enterprise, Nasir decides he has to take matters into his own hands and make his own movie.
There’s nothing filmmakers love more – and honestly, nothing more exciting to watch – than showing off how hard it is to make a movie in the first place, and it’s plain to see that director Reema Kagti is having a blast with those early scenes in particular. There’s such a scrappiness to what Nasir and his friends are doing, from the amateur nature of all the crew members involved to the practical effects they necessarily have to use to keep the movie magic alive. Actresses bring their children to set, and people leave in the middle of the shoot to go open their other businesses. Rickshaws double as makeup trailers, and a piece of fruit with a wig on it serves as someone’s head getting bashed in. Without the money of a big, Bollywood production, the cast and crew are forced to work together to be clever and enterprising, and it’s all filmed with a sense of wonder.
The last third of the film returns to that magical feeling, adding to the film’s emotional arc. But the construction of the plot as a whole can often feel a little sloppily stitched together, particularly in the film’s midsection.
After the success of the first parody film, Nasir transforms into a swaggering jerk, a far cry from the passionate, well-meaning guy we met at the beginning of the film. It’s a trope we’ve all seen before – a little bit of money turns the main character greedy and opportunistic, and his journey then becomes about remembering who he was before success. But beyond being a tired trope that isn’t developed all that well, Nasir does a few things that feel pretty unforgivable – namely, not being up front with his crew, which is mostly made up of his friends, about exactly how much money the movies they make have been earning.
Now, “Superboys of Malegaon” is based on a true story, so you might take some of this critique with a grain of salt. But even if what happens with Nasir’s character is true to life, the change in characterization feels abrupt and thin. The character follows the arc we expect, coming back to himself by the film’s end. But it’s a switch that’s a little hard to swallow. Lucky for “Superboys of Malegaon,” those bookend sections have enough heart to swallow up the film’s muddled middle.
