Ranbir Kapoor, AR Rahman driven Rockstar turns 11

Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar is most memorable to me for turning Devdas into a rock musical with Ranbir’s hair longer than the film’s vision. It is also memorable for the gorgeous Nargis Fakhri playing her verbose neon-era Paro without knowing a word of Hindi. Ranbir before the film’s release told me, “You watch, Nargis will receive the National award.” I am still watching. _Rockstar_ is a multi-layered luminous look at a life that Jim Morrison, Guru Dutt and MF Hussain would have recognized. The passionate but pained pilgrimage of a musician from a small-town joke to global phenomenon is charted with delicacy and meticulous care. Time becomes an irrelevant and disembodied concept while defining Jordan’s troubled role as social misfit and an uncouth lover. Fatally flawed, Janardan Jakhard, AKA Jordan (he gets the cool name from the love of his life) looks at life success fame and mortality as things that are not to be taken seriously…Until love strikes, he knows not when. Jordan only knows he needs to go with that elevating exhilarating bracing feeling of falling (and falling…) in love. Fall, he does. In love, and in his allotted berth in the haul of fame. Most of the playing-time of this long deep profound and liberating exploration of love, operates on compelling life-defining cliches. Like the small-town boy who makes it big but looks at success with a contempt that he often spews in his physically offensive behaviour, barking and biting at the press, sniping at the people who try to love him, creating the drama of the damned in a circle of frenzied self-annihilation, not always succeeding in making his point behind the contours of incoherence that Jordan has chosen to adopt as his habitat. But here is the thing. Jordan works as a fatally-flawed creature of darkness and desperation because director Imtiaz Ali and his lead Ranbir Kapoor seem to have probed the protagonist without losing out on that vital quality that underlines every search for the character’s core: the turmoil.

Ranbir plays Jordan by first accepting him as a flawed character and then taking him gently out of his comfort zone of cliches to play him with a rare blend of humour and passion. Once again Rockstar proves beyond doubt that Ranbir understands the craft of acting better than any actor of his generation. Ranbir takes Jordan through the perils and pitfalls of success with cliched characters like the small-town benevolent manager (Kumud Mishra), the slimy music magnate (Piyush Mishra) and the sneaky television journalist ( Aditi Rao Hydari ) popping out of the woodwork (certifiable gleaming classy teak, of course) with a kind of peripheral assuredness that comes when you know the centre is sturdy and hundred percent reliable. Ranbir finds his character’s centre, pulling it out of Jordan’s soul like a baby being brought into the world kicking screaming and protesting. It’s a performance that screams for attention and yet doesn’t really follow any formula of flamboyance to get attention. Beyond the central performance, Rockstar gives us desperately profound insight into the pitfalls of success and stardom. Jordan gets it all, shuns it and makes that final desperate lunge for love. He is Guru Dutt on cocaine. Devdas in a rock stadium. Jordan’s love story with the beautiful free-spirited quixotic and quite gorgeous Heer ( Nargis Fakhri ) is the stuff legendary romances are made of. Lamentably Nargis misses the bus by a several miles, leaving her character with that anxious far-away look of a half-etched creation. Nargis is unable to merge into Heer’s liberated soul. Where Heer is destined to smoulder Nargis simply simpers. She tries, though. Hers is a good effort. But when you have the furiously fluent Ranbir as a co-star effort is not enough. Nargis’ over-dubbed dialogues by the female voice which believes in driving in the point with several extra punctuation marks, doesn’t really help Nargis Fakhri get to the centre of her character. At the most, she stands at the edge looking in wondrously at Heer’s astounding graph from Delhi University’s “hottest” to a smothered wife and a dying lover-girl. Anil Mehta’s camera moves through Delhi, Prague and Kashmir in search of a voice to the visual. We can almost hear the soul of these landscapes stretching their compelling drama into the souls of the characters. Editor Aarti Bajaj has cut the footage like a precious diamond. The sparkle never dazzles for display, though. No way! The feelings underlying the outstanding mise en scene are scattered across the valleys and streams of the film’s emotional landscape, lending to the work a rare and indeterminate beauty. That most of the outstanding sequences in Rockstar feature Ranbir are no coincidence. He is to this film what Rajesh Khanna was to Hrishikesh Mukherjee was to Anand. And what Jim Morrison was and is to Rock music. You carry away images of self-annihilating stardom, of a love so deep long and strong that it makes Devdas’s passion for Paro seem like a cruised chapter. You carry away A R Rahman ’s resonant rock-stadia sounds and Mohit Chauhan’s evocative pain-lashed vocals for Jordan. Most of all you carry away that exhilarating feeling of having witnessed cinema that takes itself and its leading man to a new level of expressiveness. Rockstar is a spellbinding courageous coming-of-rage saga woven into a tantalizing tapestry of memory and angst and driven forward with demoniacal fury by Ranbir Kapoor’s centrally-heated performance. This is Imtiaz Ali’s best work so far. Interestingly another film based on rock music Rock On 2 was released on the same day November 11, five years later in 2016 a few days after the PM announced demonetization. Rock On 2 failed to create the magic Rock On released in 2008. As for Rockstar, it remains an intriguing failure, more memorable for what it attempted than what it achieved. Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.