Film Review: ‘Rockstar’

Barring Ranbir Kapoor's magnetic performance, Imtiaz Ali's story of an Indian rock idol is a cinematic belly-flop.

Director: Imtiaz Ali
Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Nargis Fakhri, Shernaz Patel, Piyush Mehra, Aditi Rao Hydari
Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Burdened with anemic characterisations and exaggerated emotion, Rockstar is a 2 hour 40 minute soap opera of a film. Ranbir Kapoor does his best to get into the skin of his character of sufi rock god Jordan, but Imtiaz Ali’s direction is so staid that you scarcely see why Kapoor’s character becomes the idol of millions.

One gets the feeling that Ali took a bunch of incongruent plot points, hurled them in a blender and poured the results on screen. He invokes such contemporaneous themes as Sufi rock and forbidden love, but believes that they alone could magically produce narrative substance. At some points, Rockstar even ceases to seem like a film, and turns into a high-brow tourism campaign when the gorgeous locales of Prague take over from the muddled plot.

Delhi college boy Janardan Jakhar (Ranbir) worships Jim Morrison and dreams of becoming a rock legend himself. His friend and mentor (Kumud Mishra) advises him that one must experience the sorrow of a broken heart to produce truly great music. Janardhan tries to achieve this by flirting with and eventually befriending a pretty Kashmiri girl named Heer (Fakhri). Needless to say, hell breaks loose when they fall apart, and Janardhan transforms into the successful but bitter rock star Jordan, while Heer struggles to swallow her own grief. It doesn’t help that our heroine can’t deliver a single line without contorting her face into terrible expressions. Instead of a sassy trailblazer, she comes across as an indiscriminate oaf afflicted with a short attention span.

Ali seemed to have a wealth of compelling material at his disposal, but somehow the film doesn’t quite cohere. Flitting through past and present, the bloodless screenplay runs dutifully through Jordan’s life—he meets a girl, he gets dumped by a girl, he becomes a rock star—as though ticking off the points against a checklist. There was so much more there that could have been told, so many more struggles that should have been shown.

Everything after the interval, when Jordan follows Heer to Prague, results in a barrage of ludicrously banal verbiage. To make matters worse, Ali ends up presenting the bitter and “evolved” Jordan as little more than a fatuous groupie, instead of a terrific, shattered hero. Technically, however, Rockstar is breathtaking. The lovely Prague locales are complimented by the otherworldly, pulp rock colours of Jordan on stage. The film makes for tasty eye and ear candy; A. R. Rahman’s music extracts full attention. The songs “Kun Faaya Kun” and “Sadda Haq” are superbly picturised.

The supporting characters, including Shernaz Patel and Piyush Mehra, as Heer’s mother and Jordan’s music producer respectively, are jarringly superficial and icy and it’s hard to care about them. Aditi Rao Hydari’s ruthless television journalist exists in the film for the simplistic two-fold purpose to show that she is hot and that she is a supreme rhymes-with-witch. Other than the magnetically gifted Kapoor, who delivers an incredible performance despite his sub-standard source material, Rockstar has nothing by way of passion or vivaciousness. It is far too demure to explore its subject matter and make much of a lasting impression. Catch it to see a fantastic performance by a charismatic actor, but go in with patience and the realisation that the film is something of a fascinating failure.