SUPERBOYS OF MALEGAON - Mark Reviews Movies

Superboys of Malegaon, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 27, 2025

Sometimes, the idea for a story can carry that tale, and Superboys of Malegaon has the good fortune of being based on a real story that's genuinely inspiring and sincerely moving. It's about a group of friends in the Indian city of Malegaon, which is mostly known for its cloth industry. Until these friends decided to pursue what seemed like a wholly unlikely dream, the place definitely would never be mistaken for a hub of filmmaking. Once the group determined they might not make it in or even to Bollywood, they decided to create a film industry in their city from the ground up.

Director Reema Kagti's movie is a love letter to dreamers and those who eke out some success by whatever means are available to them. It all sounds good, of course, and at its best, the movie gives us a sense of how people with little money and perhaps less real-world experience can still see those dreams come to fruition. It's also a bit too unfocused for that story and the characters within it to really come to life.

When it scratches that feel-good itch, though, there's a lot to admire about the real-life subjects and what they accomplished, even if Varun Grover's screenplay spreads both the scope and the conflict of this tale thin. At a certain point, the human drama behind the scenes takes over, and we realize the movie's affection for and attention to truly independent filmmaking is so diluted that these guys might as well have had any other dream. The story would have remained almost entirely intact.

Grover and Kagti rush through the most specific and, therefore, worthwhile details of this story. In theory, it's all about how several young men, who only know about movies from watching whatever comes to the local theaters and is available at the video store, learn by way of simply doing the work. One of the three or four main characters here, for example, is Nasir (Adarsh Gourav), who manages one of the city's movie theaters. In addition to the biggest hits coming out of Mumbai, Nasir plays classic silent comedies, which don't sell many tickets but have provided the young man with an education in the basics of old-fashioned filmmaking.

After getting in trouble with the law for piracy by using a pair of VCRs to edit together the best bits of different movies, Nasir decides the best way to see the kind of movie he wants to see on the big screen—and assumes others in the city would pay to see—is make it himself. To do so, he enlists the aid of out-of-work newspaper writer Farogh (Vineet Singh Kumar) and several friends—most of them, like Shafique (Shashank Arora), aspiring actors who don't have the funds to travel to Mumbai.

The team doesn't have much—a few thousand rupees, the camera Nasir already owns for his videographer gig on the side, plenty of people willing to volunteer time and effort—but make do with some scrappy thinking, such as welding a tray to the front of a bicycle to serve as a camera dolly, and a bit of clever marketing, such as selling advertising time in the movie to local businesses, and a lot of ambition. Watching everyone work together to bring the project to life is quite fun (although Kagti might be a little generous in depicting the final product, which is made in 1997, recorded on video, and apparently edited by way of a pair of VCRs but somehow looks and sounds as if it was assembled by professionals with technology this group doesn't possess).

After the first movie is a rousing success, that success quickly goes to Nasir's head, and soon enough, all sorts of bickering, resentment, and fighting result. The most significant creative conflict is between the director, who thinks audiences only want familiar stories and sets out to remake hits localized to Malegaon, and the screenwriter, who has original stories of his own he wants filmed and starts to see Nasir as a money-hungry hack. A lot could be culled from this, but whether it's an invention on Grover's part or an unfortunate part of the real story, the end result is that the conflict comes to a quick end when Farogh decides to try his luck in Mumbai.

From there, the story really has nowhere to go, except to keep showing how prideful and forgetful of his friends Nasir becomes, as most of those of friends and the filmmaking projects are forgotten by the movie itself. The narrative transforms into a series of subplots—Nasir's troubled love life, Farogh's Bollywood misadventures, some little details about the friends/crewmembers as their dreams are pushed aside by the director's ambition. The melodrama stacks up, for sure, and in the process, the movie loses the heart of the story.

It does, thankfully, return by the end, with the team reuniting to make another movie in which the overlooked Shafique finally gets his deserved moment in the spotlight. While it's too little too late to compensate for the various missteps and shortcomings of the screenplay, there's little denying the emotional impact of the third act, when the characters' personal dreams and the dream-making potential of the movies align. At that point, Superboys of Malegaon embraces everything that could have worked throughout the movie.

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