On demand: "Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa"

1993's Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa was Shah Rukh Khan - poised on the brink of superstardom, two years before Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge - in one of his favourite roles. His boyish dreamer Sunil doesn't know much about biology, geology or algebra - to all outward appearances, indeed, he's a scholastic failure - largely because he prefers to spend his days and nights as the trumpeter in a band, bringing to the rehearsal room more enthusiasm than experience or expertise. What he does know is that he's crazy about local sweetheart Anna (Suchitra Krishnamoorthi), the band's singer. Anna, alas, only has eyes for Sunil's close friend, uptown boy Chris (Deepak Tijori), leaving Sunil to blow his own trumpet. (It's never easy being a young man with a horn.) So our boy takes it upon himself to sabotage his bandmates' romance, a state of affairs that results in him a) breaking his beloved's heart and b) being kicked out of said band. (Deservedly, you might conclude.) Khan was soon to become one of the all-time great heroes of the Indian cinema - action, comedy, romance, countering the country's sporadic lapses into Islamophobia: truly, he could do it all - but he began his acting career playing villains of various stripes; Sunil, in this context, really does seem like a pivotal or transitional role, flushing out the last few drops of the rogue and bastard in this performer so that he could get on with charming everybody's pants off.

Co-writer/director Kundan Shah wisely treats this cartoonish tale of puppy love as something that shouldn't be approached too seriously: the early rehearsal scenes - terrorising the eye with wall-to-wall neon leisurewear - emit a strong Saved by the Bell energy. The film has comic smarts, though; weeks on from seeing it, its ideas are still making me laugh. A paying nightclub crowd found in a constant state of outrage at the terrible bands set before them; the diabetic dad going to absurd lengths to get his hands on a slice of cake; the world's most empathetic gangboss and his enforcer, for some reason modelled on Stevie Wonder circa 1982. There is in here a vivid flashback to those American teen movies that had preceded it, and - more specifically yet - something approaching the borderline unhinged vision "Savage" Steve Holland arrived at in doodling all over 1985's Better Off Dead.... (As in many of those US teenpics, you'll need to look past these kids' ages, and the fact one of them actually looks older than their own onscreen father.) Mostly, there is SRK as the image of restless youth: sometimes wrongheaded, always goodhearted, he runs, jumps and clambers all over these Goa locations, performs his own stunts, and does his very best to conquer some small corner of a world that would soon be his entirely. The direction of career travel becomes most obvious during a finale that gathers the cast, representing the village it's taken to raise the often wayward child Sunil, to pay fulsome tribute to the dude we've just spent two-and-a-half hours watching ("He is unique, one in a thousand"). If ever you wanted to know why India is so fond of this star - and so forgiving of its eldest sons' character flaws - this would be a most enjoyable place to start.

Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa is now streaming on Netflix.