On demand: "Raees"

Faced with any suggestion his days as a leading man and box-office force may be nearing an end, Shah Rukh Khan's response has been to roll his sleeves up to his still-considerable biceps and put his unarguable versatility to use in any project that comes his way: a dual role in last summer's Fan, a funny cameo in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, a touching supporting turn in Dear Zindagi, back to romantic lead duties (paired with a much younger actress) in the recent Jab Harry Met Sejal. Somewhere in this flurry of mid-life activity - seriously, does the dude ever sleep? - he found space and time to headline the crime story Raees, a Bollywood Roaring Twenties (albeit set during the Seventies and Eighties) about a scrawny kid who rises through the ranks of the underworld to become the dry state of Gujarat's number one bootlegger. 

With the possible exception of Fan, this is the first film in Khan's recent filmography where you sense the actor being challenged, most prominently in those scenes that pit his Raees against Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Majmudar, the no-nonsense cop on our antihero's tail. On one side of the frame, the star, projecting outwards, all megawatt charisma; on the other, the sly character actor, seemingly unfussed by the trappings of fame, burrowing deep down inside his role, knowing his contract will require him to lose a few scenes, but that he may just steal off with the picture, and plaudits besides. These battles-within-battles are always great fun to watch: the mind immediately goes towards Tom Cruise facing off against Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible III, although the criminal context means Raees is rather closer to Heat, had Pacino and de Niro swapped roles.

The director, Rahul Dholakia, is smart enough to know this is the good stuff: although we get a smattering of Ram Sampath songs, and scenes from Raees's romance with a local sweetheart (Mahira Khan, exactly the kind of slightly haughty, contemptuous beauty a street thug might aspire to), the main thrust of the movie is this cat-and-mouse affair. What's notable - and in this, Raees might just be claimed as having at least one foot in the camp of New Bollywood, a movement that tends not to think in easy black-and-white - is that the direction remains relatively neutral, allowing the actors to shift our allegiances around from scene to scene. Raees may cut a vaguely Robin Hood-ish figure through the first half, but becomes notably more thuggish upon inveigling himself in state politics; by the time he's witnessed beating a temperance campaigner round the head with a microphone at a rally, you may begin to forget the character is being played by a beloved performer.

Even so, the film betrays a flicker of sympathy as this outlaw - and the constituency he comes to represent - is screwed over, first by career politicians, then his shadier contacts. One of Dholakia's achievements here is completing a deft sketch of 20th century criminal activity, from the comparatively innocent, piss-up fun of bootlegging to the terrorism that has started to blight our cities; with his mane of hair and retro glasses, Khan's Raees may well remind British and Irish viewers of Gerry Adams, and - right through to his downbeat ending - Dholakia acknowledges his protagonist is a tricky individual to entirely lionise. Khan's workrate means it's becoming harder to identify which films he intends as the major, must-see, legacy projects, and which ones a star undertakes just to keep his investment portfolio ticking over. Nevertheless, Raees does feel in some small way significant: an attempt - within a multiplex-bound entertainment - to put forward a shaded, complex characterisation, and a vision of a bustling, colourful, in some ways impossibly corrupted corner of India.

Raees is now available to stream on Netflix.