‘Superboys of Malegaon’ Review: Making a Local Hit

In the Hindi-language film “Superboys of Malegaon,” a wedding videographer named Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) dreams of making movies that will transform his brother’s video parlor in the western Indian city of Malegaon into a movie theater, packed like the one across the street. For this fool’s errand, he enlists his closest friends.

A love letter to independent filmmaking, “Superboys,” directed by Reema Kagti and written by Kagti and Varun Grover, has its requisite share of goofball pleasures and familiar insights about scrappy moviemaking in the shadow of a behemoth industry. But this tale — inspired by the 2008 documentary “Supermen of Malegaon” — succeeds most as a touching tribute to friendship.

Although Malegaon is more than 200 miles by train from Mumbai, that distance doesn’t curtail the reach of the antipiracy police. Nasir learns this when he starts making films splicing Bollywood action sequences with scenes of Buster Keaton antics. Chastised but not cowed, Nasir and his friends — Shafique (Shashank Arora), Aleem (Pallav Singh), Akram (Anuj Duhan), Irfan (Saqib Ayub) and Farogh (Vineet Singh) — begin shooting their own film, which becomes a local hit. With success, tensions arise between the friends.

Throughout “Superboys,” the fans crowding the movie theater are men. The sole woman on Nisar’s all-male set is Trupti (Manjiri Pupala), the female lead. But Katgi and Grover tease a marriage story subplot (featuring Muskkaan Jaferi as Shabeena) that expands the story to include women.

Still, it’s the hangdog Shafique, a textile worker, who proves to be the heart of “Superboys.” When he coughs up blood, it heralds an authentic shift in tone. He becomes both a Superman and the movie’s kryptonite to cynicism.

Superboys of Malegaon
Rated PG-13 for smoking and some language. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters.