Coming around again: "Rockstar"

This week's Hindi reissue is 2011's Rockstar: that swooniest of dreamers Imtiaz Ali calling the shots, A.R. Rahman excelling himself on song duties, baby Ranbir Kapoor in the title role. Where 2008's Rock On!! offered a study in group dynamics, Ali's field of interest lay in the perils and pitfalls of going solo, yielding what proved an altogether impressionistic portrait of the artist as a young man. Its parameters are established in the opening moments. Having introduced us to Kapoor's wild-maned axeman Jordan at the height of global success, brawling in the street just minutes before taking the stage for the Italian leg of his world tour, Ali flashes back to where it all began: with Jordan in his previous guise of Delhi college wimp Janardhan Jakhar (or "JJ" for short), clad in unflattering woollens, seizing upon Mr. Big's "To Be with You" as his (unsuccessful) audition piece, and generally bemoaning his status and lack of life experience. How's a fellow supposed to come up with worthwhile tunes, when he hasn't even had his heart broken? Enter stage left beautiful, well-bred Kashmiri dancer Heer (Nargis Fakhri) - yes, Heer from Kashmir, a rhyme irresistible in itself - to perform precisely that function. If Jordan is the film's power chord, the stadium-filling behemoth with passion in his heart, fire in his belly and the world at his feet, then JJ is its B minor, a lowly, self-pitying dork with bad hair and ill-fitting jeans. The narrative would be Rockstar's own chord progression, allowing Ali to riff on his chosen theme: how our creatives work their way from here to there on the fretboard of life.

The film's most measurable achievement is that it develops some way beyond its initial portrait of the artist as a young weirdo. Even as late as 2011, Bollywood was still giving young male cinemagoers the opportunity to identify with a protagonist who presents unambiguously as a stalker for some of Rockstar's duration; the one mitigating circumstance is that JJ is stalking the one other person on screen who's very nearly as weird as him. Heer is characterised as a slumming wildcat whose big suggestion, when she stops hissing at her pursuer and grants him a date, is that the pair check out the Delhi equivalent of a porno cinema. "You would have been raped if the lights had come on!," chortles JJ afterwards, a line that strikes the ear as unutterable in the post-#MeToo era. As you may already be gathering, all sorts of caveats have to be offered up when discussing Rockstar in 2025: this is a deeply male vision of the universe (Heer serves as a fickle, then a sickly muse), not unfantastical with that, and romantic to the point of seeming obsessive. It's also hamstrung to some degree by what to Western eyes is going to seem a limited idea of bohemia; as Heer and JJ pass in their twenties through several of Prague's most discreet and decorous stripjoints, you realise the film is also - unintentionally - a portrait of the artist working within tight censorship restrictions. (See also: the "FREE TIBET" banner blurred out in the background as JJ - now transformed into Jordan - plays a gig in support of free speech.) Yet don't be surprised if, even with all these reservations, you still find long stretches of Rockstar sweeping you up and carrying you along, if not necessarily away.

It helps that the film dates from a moment where Ranbir's big kid act retained some residual charm, and that - to his and Ali's credit - the role allows the star to grow up, quite spectacularly, before our eyes. (At one point, JJ appears to gain a stylist, which would seem vital to his and the film's success.) What keeps Rockstar distinctively Indian - and distinct from the Mark Wahlberg film with the similar title - is that on some level it's a drama of reincarnation. Janardhan, JJ and Jordan each have to be crushed in some way so as to be reborn as a new man - a homeless temple player, a musician for hire, an artist in his own right, a god lacking inner peace - with a darker, worldlier sound. (Unlike current release Chhaava, it's one of those films where Rahman's songs are essential to the overall effect.) In Ali's universe, it is the artist's prerogative to mess up - and then keep messing up - until he gets it right; each incarnation of the central character is a flesh-and-blood embodiment of the alternate studio takes we see JJ laying down. (He even has his own unkempt Buddha on standby in Kumud Mishra's canteen manager-turned-confidant Khatana.) Rockstar's own mistakes, wobbles and follies, then, invite reading as part of the process; they can be folded into the overall thesis, which is broadly that you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you just might find you get what you need. (A few lines for a song; a concept for an enduring movie.) At every step, it feels personal, entirely idiosyncratic in its choices, which makes Rockstar a salutary reissue at a moment of generally depersonalised multiplex options, whether the military-industrial propaganda of 2020s Bollywood or something as rote as A Complete Unknown: it is, finally, a film about a rockstar overseen by an artist rather than a committee of producers. I suspect a lot of young Indian men trying to make it in the business may well have clung to it as a consoling post-rejection comfort watch, but Rockstar is also the film that explains why those recent Coldplay and Ed Sheeran gigs across India sold out quite as rapidly as they did: an entire generation has been raised on Ali's damp-eyed, wobbly-lipped, unimpeachably sincere idea of self-expression.

Rockstar is now showing in selected cinemas.