‘Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous’ Review: A Lazy and Incurious Celebrity Documentary

Director: Mozez Singh 

Genre: Documentary 

Streaming on: Netflix 

Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous follows, fusses over and indulges Indian rapper Honey Singh on his comeback trail in 2023. He declares that he has returned from the dead for his fans. He looks rejuvenated. On cue, two young ragpickers at a traffic signal recognise and laud him for losing weight. The brief is simple: new body, new mind, new music videos after years of substance abuse, mental health issues and rehabilitation. Drugs are never mentioned, but the camera focuses on his physical tics and foot tapping enough to hint at it. This part is interspersed with his up-and-down journey up till this point: bits of his childhood, his early talent, his fame and fandom, and his widely chronicled collapse. The treatment is all too familiar. The lens becomes his mouthpiece. At some point, he stops being a person. He morphs into a neatly segregated storyline, an impenetrable idea that’s at once marketed and sold.  

It’s remarkable how little a typical celebrity documentary like Famous says about modern celebrity. It’s so concerned with looking like fiction — a rise-fall-comeback arc; a dramatic voice-over; a ‘staged’ spontaneity; retro-fitted emotions — that reality itself becomes a footnote. The film-making is too busy packaging a life to be curious about it. The problem isn’t that it reveals nothing we don’t already know. That’s par for the course with non-fiction productions these days. It’s that, even in Honey Singh’s more vulnerable and performative moments, it seldom recognises the irony of what he represents. If anything, the film-making seems to protect Singh; it appears to be anxious about how he behaves, almost like it’s wary of him exposing himself. As a result, he appears to be prompting the flow rather than the other way around. 

The efforts to probe the star about his controversies — like the misogyny of his lyrics; accusations of domestic abuse; his song “balatkari” coming in the slipstream of the 2012 Delhi gangrape — are half-hearted and cringey. It nearly paints him as an unpretentious victim of outrage, irresponsible press and internet-age wokeness. It mentions his marriage in passing but doesn’t forget to throw his ex-wife under the bus. Much of the documentary empathises with the burden of his masculinity. He outright denies having written the songs and then speaks about karma, but the film isn’t sure about how to deal with uncomfortable situations and an inherently flawed persona. You hear the makers feign scrutiny and ask token variations of “Wow, really? But why, Honey?” and “Your house had no windows?” from behind the camera, with all the spirit of a child having to force-drink a glass of milk before school.  

If the intent is to show the camaraderie between the crew and their subject, it erases any illusion of objectivity. When Honey gets introspective and says things like, “The biggest lie of life is life,” shaky close-ups of his face are juxtaposed with lyrical visuals of a bonfire. In other words, the documentary is too enamoured by their access — and by the theatricality of who he is — to actually investigate his feelings. You can tell that it’s in service of his cult. His spiral is tiptoed around, occasionally reducing the documentary to the kind of video montages that TV reality shows milk in search of tears and TRPs. It takes some doing to make a troubled artist look uninteresting — or worse, tropey. To make an accumulated sense of history feel like a formula. But Famous somehow blunts the contradictions of Honey Singh. It lets him use the screen as more of a motivational diary. Even the talking heads, not least Salman Khan, make no worthy observations. It’s an acquired (dis)taste, this genre of commercial non-fiction.  

At some level, Famous also seems exoticised to appeal to global audiences.  

While that’s understandable, it then becomes more of a tribute that’s willing a pre-designed story — not a life — to continue. The only affecting portions revolve around the singer’s attachment to his childhood home, a place he misses because of the boy he used to be. There’s an ache in his voice when he recalls the Karampura house, a longing that perhaps his addiction to fame — and subservience to the public — has played a role in activating. At times, he sounds a lot like Diljit Dosanjh’s Amar Singh Chamkila in Imtiaz Ali’s biopic from earlier this year. The subtext deepens the pit in our stomach. But then Famous goes into The Dark Knight mode, building up towards a redemption hero sequel, completely misreading the cultural connotations of the moment. It refuses to detect the subtext as well as the tragedy of a singer in search of a voice. It’s the equivalent of a happy background score erroneously playing over an intense scene. After all, there’s no bigger tragedy than a documentary that can't read its room.