Superboys Of Malegaon Review: The Film Is An All-Round Delight

Superboys Of Malegaon Review: Fuelled by measured performances that blend energy with restraint, the characters and the film are in reach for the sky, while staying firmly rooted to the ground

Their incredible true story has been in the public domain for well over a decade and a half but the deeds of the moviemakers of Malegaon have never ceased to fascinate. Inherent in the tale is the drama of improbable dreams of nondescript individuals clashing with daunting societal and economic constraints and, in the bargain, engendering phenomenal acts of self-belief.  

Director Reema Kagti captures it all in Superboys of Malegaon, a matter-of-fact fictionalized retelling. Her film is a classic rollercoaster in which dizzying and sobering, flighty and probing, roll into and out of each other.  

Superboys of Malegaon, produced by Excel Entertainment and Tiger Baby, is about unremarkable lives made noteworthy by trajectories less ordinary. But, operating firmly within the realms of the real and the relatable, the film steers well clear of the cliches of the genre.  

It does well not to cast the Malegaon men in the mould of oddballs in a rags-to-riches tale. It portrays them as who they were—flesh-and-blood individuals navigating the ups and downs of ambition, friendship, and love lost and found in the face of the inevitable transience of fame and the insubstantiality of success.  

But more than anything else, it celebrates the hurly-burly of filmmaking and delves into the dynamics of an economically liberalized society grappling with conflicting impulses. The location and the characters are drawn from Faiza Ahmad Khan’s hour long documentary Supermen of Malegaon, made in 2008 and released in 2012 but taken beyond the boundaries of the non-fiction film.  

Amid the flurry of over-loud, hyper-nationalistic actioners that Bollywood foists upon us these days, Superboys of Malegaon is a welcome respite from the deafening din, a return to a cinematic canvas on which tangible humanity comes up against its own shortcomings and looks for ways around them.      

The screenplay by Varun Grover (who has also written the dialogues with Shoaib Zulfi Nazeer) is marked by a keen sense of how the magic of the mundane works when it collides with the desperate desire to break free from the daily grind of survival.  

The film presents a freewheeling account of events that unfolded around the town’s scrappy, messy and fiercely doughty filmmaking projects that represented, like all art does, a bulwark against inertia, anonymity and mortality.   

Admittedly, in the case of the Malegaon boys (and a girl, with a baby in tow, who agrees to play a version of Sholay’s Basanti in a rough-and-ready version of the Ramesh Sippy blockbuster) far more commonplace issues are at play—economic uncertainty, vocational challenges, and the patriarchy ingrained in an ultra-conservative society where women are discouraged from stepping out of their domestic confines.  

Can a film made today for distribution on a streaming platform after a theatrical run approximate the fits-and-starts quality of the lives and films thought up and created by Nasir Shaikh (Adarsh Gourav), his best pal and power loom factory worker Shafique Shaikh (Shashank Arora), alcoholic writer Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh) and the rest of the motley Malegaon crew?  

Superboys of Malegaon comes exceptionally close to capturing the random rhythms of life in a place where the everyday is more everyday than in most other places but is yet fraught with dispiriting ambiguity. It is aided in the process by Swapnil S. Sonawane’s unobtrusive but impeccable cinematography and Anand Subaya’s editing, which lends the film the staccato rhythm that it needs.    

The film possesses all the elements that you would expect in a story of men and a woman from a conservative neck of the woods looking to make their way out of oblivion with the most limited of material means but a bagful of gumption.  

Fuelled by measured performances that blend energy with restraint, the characters and the film that they are in reach for the sky while staying firmly rooted to the ground. It begins in 1997 in a video parlour, where Nasir screens films featuring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The audience stays away. They are more into current Bollywood films running in a theatre nearby. 

Nasir decides to spice up his shows by splicing Chaplin and Keaton together with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and delivering a movie-watching experience unlike any other. The ploy pays off until the police intervene, charge Nasir with piracy and seal the video parlour.  

Painted into a corner and left with no option, Nasir, armed with Rs 12000, plunges into the making of his own films—parodies of Bollywood hits—for the local audience in their own language. 

There is scepticism all around, not the least from Nasir’s elder brother Nihal (Gyanendra Tripathi), who believes that filmmaking cannot guarantee naan and nihari. But his friends—a tea stall owner, a dry fruits seller, a wedding video cameraman, an Urdu teacher and sundry power loom workers—jump into the enterprise, which kicks off with Malegaon Ke Sholay. There are hurdles aplenty in Nasir’s path. 

Matters of the heart, too, take their toll on him. The girl he loves, Mallika (Riddhi Kumar), is out of his league. But Shabeena (Muskaan Jaferi), studying to be a lawyer, has a crush on him. The only other woman in the Superboys of Malegaon orbit, Trupti (Manjiri Pupala), is an actress who seeks to escape an abusive marriage and develops a tremulous bond with Shafique.   

The thought of shifting to Mumbai never crosses Nasir’s mind. Acutely aware of the enormity of the struggle of making it in Bollywood, he is averse to abandoning the comfort of home. But writer Farogh, disdainful of the knockoffs that Nasir produces, moves to Mumbai in the hope of finding takers.  

The writer is the boss, Farogh thunders when he figures out to his chagrin that Nasir isn’t interested in ever making good on the promise to work on original ideas.

In Superboys of Malegaon, the writer is indeed the boss, but the film, spearheaded by director Kagti and principal cast members Adarsh Gourav, Shashank Arora, Vineet Kumar Singh, and Muskaan Jaferi, is an all-round delight—a spirited, heartwarming, and super (in a quiet sort of way) ode to the movies.