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'Superboys of Malegaon' Movie Review: The Best Kind of Crowd-Pleaser
The Reema Kagti film is a captivating ode to cinema, living and everything in between.
Director: Reema Kagti
Writer: Varun Grover
Cast: Adarsh Gourav, Vineet Kumar Singh, Shashank Arora, Saqib Ayub, Anuj Singh Duhan, Muskkaan Jaferi, Riddhi Kumar, Manjiri Pupala, Pallav Singh
Language: Hindi
Fictional translations of ready-made underdog journeys make me nervous. As do independent themes getting the mainstream treatment. A recent example is Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins (2023), a sports comedy about “the weakest football team in the world” that reduced its source material (a fantastic 2014 documentary) to a checklist of sef-conscious tropes. In terms of concept and design, Superboys of Malegaon ticks both boxes.
Directed by Reema Kagti and written by Varun Grover, the 131-minute feature is inspired by Faiza Ahmad Khan’s Supermen of Malegaon (2012), a charming 65-minute documentary that revolves around the cinema-crazy residents of a small Maharashtrian town who start their own DIY-filmmaking ecosystem of Bollywood spoofs. I remember watching Khan’s documentary and marvelling at how it married the objectivity of journalism with the subjectivity of emotion. It allowed the story to tell itself, while trusting the ‘characters’ to underline its humour with cultural meaning.
But I’m happy — and relieved — to note that Superboys of Malegaon not only retains the essence of the story, it also expands the subtext of its telling. It’s the right kind of adaptation: a crowd-pleaser with a heart, a head and a rare cognisance of the world it arrives in. The cast is solid; the script is layered; the pitch is high but not deafening; the visual tone is neat without being (too) sanitised; the soundtrack is perceptive and diverse; the gaze rarely punches down; even its flaws are logical.
As a narrative, it works on multiple levels. First, as a rousing artist story. In the late 1990s, a gang of young and resourceful friends — Nasir (Adarsh Gourav), Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh), Akram (Anuj Singh Duhan), Shafique (Shashank Arora), Irfan (Saqib Ayub) and Aleem (Pallav Singh) — decide to produce their own movies. Their decision stems from several factors: a burning passion for film, the revival of Nasir’s family video parlour (where they’d only curate Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin titles), a crackdown on piracy, and a general need for escapism.
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Their first film, a parody called Malegaon Ke Sholay, runs to packed houses. By staging the ‘Malegaon movie industry’ as a universal landscape of art-versus-commerce conflicts, the story is defined by topical drama. The bitter writer resents his director for “selling out” — for courting sponsors, for resorting to massy concepts or remakes, for credit hogging, for using budget constraints as an excuse for creative bankruptcy. The aspiring actor is torn between two factions. Fame becomes an intoxicant. There are confrontations, fallouts, estrangements. It’s a tried-and-tested template.
It also works as a film about film-making; this inherently romantic genre is hard to dislike. Superboys of Malegaon ranges from 1997 to 2011, spread across the medium’s transition from film to digital. While this isn’t the focus, the background remains attentive: VHS tapes make way for CDs over time, camera models evolve, computers emerge, sensibilities get wider. The little Easter eggs and details are enjoyable. Part of the heroine’s performance is being a diva on set. Actors break character to advertise a matchbox in the middle of a scene (supplying the irony of the actual anti-smoking disclaimers on screen). The real Nasir fleetingly appears as a projectionist. The opening credits juxtapose the movie-loving rhythms of the town with the bumpy transport of the latest film reels from Nashik — it’s like watching the license to dream being imported from the cities.
The joy of watching a bunch of self-taught hustlers aside, Superboys of Malegaon is rooted in the symbiotic relationship between cinema and society. Like most small towns, Malegaon feels like a place that fathoms life through the lens of fiction and reality in the language of fantasy. Philosophies are understood through Bruce Lee and Buster Keaton anecdotes. A dreamer who likes watching airplanes fly through the sky goes on to fly as Superman in a film. A doctor explains a deadly cancer as “what Rajesh Khanna had in Anand”; when the man agrees to an acting cameo later, it’s not a stretch to imagine that he had once nurtured those dreams. A grateful director promises to pay his wife back for being one of his film’s funders; she simply asks for a producer’s credit instead. Even the spats between friends look a little performative, but in a good way, as if they’re subconsciously mimicking the ‘dialogue-baazi’ and expressions they’ve grown up watching.
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What this does is plug some of the Tiger Baby Productions-shaped holes — especially their penchant for broad strokes and spelt-out subtext. The cinephilia of the town allows the overall movie to look and sound a bit filmy. For instance, Nasir suddenly acting arrogant after his Sholay succeeds might have felt extra in most stories. But here it’s almost like he’s so influenced by rags-to-riches tropes that he internalises them. Adarsh Gourav nails the brief. One of my favourite moments is fleeting: when his wife Mallika (Muskkaan Jaferi) tenderly admits that she doesn’t expect him to forget his first love (and heartbreak), Nasir closes his eyes and leans in for a kiss as if he’s summoning the courage to cheat on his previous self. The same goes for Farogh’s writerly tantrums or Shafique’s silent turmoil; everything — including life itself — is a larger-than-life experience.
In fact, Akram looks straight out of a gym in Mumbai’s Aaram Nagar or Lokhandwala, but it doesn't grate so much because of how impressionable they all are; the group aspires to not only operate like the Bombay film industry but also struggle like them. Manjiri Pupala, as Malegaon ‘actress’ Tripti, is exceptional as the only semi-professional in the group. She treats her time with these oddly ambitious men as an escape from an abusive marriage at first, where she can be anyone she wants (a talented diva, too) without any consequences. Once she warms up to Shafique, you can tell that this becomes her reality, while her unseen domestic turmoil becomes a bad dream.
But it’s the meta-social significance of Superboys... that hits the spot. It isn’t overt in its commentary, but its use of film-making becomes an allegory for political and religious identity. Malegaon is a rare Muslim-majority town in a communally tense decade; their spunk feels like Asterix’s lone Gaul village during the Roman rule. Nasir and his gang’s journey conveys the community’s makeshift agency. In a way, parody is the only medium they can afford. Isolated in a corner, they scrape together pieces of imagination from the ‘mainland,’ and are only allowed to be world-famous within these margins. Farogh’s arc — where he tries his luck as a screenwriter in Mumbai — features cliches like a Bollywood producer advising him that nobody cares about Malegaon characters. When seen in context, though, it speaks to the erasure of status and the stories of a whole culture. The line, “You’ve reserved a page for this town in the history of Indian cinema,” is literally said later, but perhaps the implicit meaning is “in the history of India”.
There’s something to be said about how Superboys of Malegaon legitimises this identity by merely existing. The obvious thing is that the Bollywood producer — who implies that audiences don’t want a commercial movie full of working-class Muslim characters — resides in a commercial movie about working-class Muslim storytellers. The difference is subtle: representation can be a patronising act, but normalisation is not. It runs deeper, though. Much of Nasir’s beef with Farogh revolves around why he chooses to make spoofs instead of original movies. The truth lies somewhere between the two. Just as Malegaon Ke Sholay, Malegaon Ki Shaan or even the documentary wouldn’t have existed if not for the classics they riffed on, Superboys of Malegaon — a feel-good Bollywood studio vehicle — wouldn’t have existed if not for the DIY Malegaon classics.
This film seems to not only get the irony of completing the cycle, it validates the essence of Malegaon’s movies: all of storytelling is derivative, but the most original stories are those that manage to make familiarity feel personal. The climax captures this beautifully, where the screening of their latest parody acquires new meaning because of the circumstances surrounding its making. Nasir and his friends find themselves expressing intangible emotions — like goodbyes and anticipatory grief — through their take on a vintage superhero movie.
Superboys... itself mirrors this tone. On one hand, Varun Grover’s screenplay subliminally reflects the cinema-is-personal message of his short film KISS (which starred Gourav as a director going through the anxiety of a censor screening) as well as the period texture of his feature film debut, All India Rank (2024). On the other hand, the script — which wrestles with the authenticity of derived art — reflects Grover’s own dual career as a standup comic (a commentary on pop culture and a pre-existing world) and a lyricist-screenwriter (originality). The film argues that the interpretative nature of the former is not lesser than the pure creation of the latter. Both are equally valid art forms.
Similarly, Superboys of Malegaon unfolds like a personal mixtape of the production companies behind it. It has shades of previous Excel and Tiger Baby titles. Of fiction that already exists. The shattered friendship and subsequent reunion — which trusts time to be the only healer — have a bit of Dil Chahta Hai (2001) and its Akash-Sid track. Shafique’s condition and the gang’s last hurrah brings to mind the Luke Kenny arc in Rock On!! (2008). The auditions and opening titles, plus the squabble between the idealistic artist and the star, evoke Luck By Chance (2009) and the rift between the Farhan Akhtar and Arjun Mathur characters. The setting and banter exude Gully Boy (2019). Much like the artistic legacy of Malegaon, Superboys... finds itself in its inspirations. In this case, familiarity makes the heart — and art — grow fonder. The voice may be derived, but the volume is new. The cinema might be imitative, but its personality is native. India might be a picture of independence, but Malegaon is the portrait of belonging.