Pankaj Tripathi has this habit of blinking right before he delivers a punchline, a nervous little tic he used in "Mimi" that somehow finds its way into the speeches of a three-time prime minister, and if I'm honest, it took me a good twenty minutes to stop seeing the actor from "Gangs of Wasseypur" and start believing in the dhoti.

Biographies of Indian politicians usually suffer from a terminal case of hagiography, treating men who orchestrated riots and negotiated nuclear treaties with the hushed reverence of saints who only ever ate lotus stems and wept for the poor, but Ravi Jadhav’s film tries to sidestep the pedestal by focusing on Atal Bihari Vajpayee as a poet who happened to get stuck running a nuclear-armed democracy. The screenplay, co-written by Jadhav and Rishi Virmani, lurches through decades with the breathless enthusiasm of a high school history textbook that refuses to skip a single chapter, rushing past the RSS drills and the jail terms under Indira Gandhi so it can get back to the good stuff about writing verse on the banks of the Yamuna.

Tripathi anchors the chaos with a performance that relies almost entirely on pauses. He doesn't bellow when he's angry, preferring to lower his voice until the entire Lok Sabha has to lean forward just to catch the insult wrapped in courtly Urdu, though there are moments where the prosthetics get in the way of his cheekbones and he looks like he's wearing a wax mask of himself that someone left out in the sun for too long.

The supporting cast features Benedict Garrett as Lord Mountbatten in a wig that deserves its own billing, alongside Rajesh Dubeay as a stern-faced LK Advani who spends most of his screen time looking like he just swallowed a lemon and regrets every political alliance he ever made. Harshal Gire and Harshad Kumar pop up as various young swayamsevaks with the kind of boundless, uncomplicated earnestness that makes you wonder if they were recruited directly from a morning shakha, shouting slogans with a vigor that feels weirdly sanitized for a movement that birthed some of the most fractious debates in modern Indian politics.

Cinematographer Arjun Sorte shoots the 1970s emergency with a sickly yellow filter that screams budget-tier television drama, making every interior look like it was lit by a single 60-watt bulb behind a greasy lampshade, though the outdoor rally scenes capture the genuine, claustrophobic sprawl of a million people sweating under a Delhi sun. Then there is the sound design, which relies on a thunderous, brass-heavy score that kicks in every single time Vajpayee so much as reaches for a fountain pen, signaling to the audience that something momentous is happening even when he is just asking for a cup of lukewarm tea.

It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the editing keeps cutting away from crowd reactions to show the exact same stock footage of pigeons taking flight over Parliament House, as if the director needed a visual metaphor for freedom every four minutes just in case we forgot our subject was a poet. You can trace the lineage of this project straight back to standard-issue patriotic Bollywood fare like "Uri: The Surgical Strike," though Jadhav is clearly more interested in the rhetorical gymnastics of parliamentary debate than the logistics of statecraft.

Vajpayee was a man known for his contradictions, a lifelong Hindu nationalist who loved a good glass of scotch and could quote liberal poets with equal fervor, and while Tripathi captures that duality in his eyes during the quieter scenes in hotel rooms, the film itself is too terrified of offending anyone to really dig into the messiness of coalition politics and the dark days of the Babri Masjid demolition. It sanitizes the edges until the man who once wrote fiery essays in "Panchjanya" looks like a grandfatherly school principal who only ever scolded bad boys with a gentle smile and a couplet.

Hindi cinema has always struggled to make films about politicians that are not either hagiographies or hit pieces, and "Main Atal Hoon" firmly plants its flag in the former camp while occasionally pretending it's holding a neutral mirror to history. When the credits roll over a montage of real archival footage of the actual Vajpayee, you are left wondering if a documentary might have given you a sharper sense of the man than two and a half hours of Tripathi struggling against a very thick layer of pancake makeup and a script that treats the Emergency as a minor inconvenience on the road to a poetic destiny.

The soundtrack by Payal Dev and Rochak Kohli tries desperately to make statecraft sound like an epic romance, swelling with strings whenever the poet-politician looks out a train window at the dusty plains of Uttar Pradesh, but the tunes evaporate from your head the second you step out of the multiplex into the parking lot. It is an exhausting, relentless parade of milestones, rushing from 1942 to Pokhran without ever stopping to let the characters breathe or argue about something trivial that has nothing to do with the future of the nation, which is perhaps why the best moments are the quiet ones where Tripathi just sits on a porch and refuses to say a damn thing.